c. 19),[1] was an act of the Parliament of Great Britain passed in 1710, which was the first statute to provide for copyright regulated by the government and courts, rather than by private parties.

[5] Under the statute, copyright was for the first time vested in authors rather than publishers; it also included provisions for the public interest, such as a legal deposit scheme.

[11] A further proclamation of 1538, aiming to stop the spread of Lutheran doctrine, saw Henry VIII note that "sondry contentious and sinyster opiniones, have by wrong teachynge and naughtye bokes increaced and growen within this his realme of England", and declare that all authors and printers must allow the Privy Council or their agents to read and censor books before publication.

The old method of censorship had been limited by the Second Statute of Repeal, and with Mary's increasing unpopularity the existing system was unable to cope with the number of critical works being printed.

[9] In this way the government "harnessed the self interest of the publishers to the yoke of royal incentive", guaranteeing that the company would follow the rules due to the economic monopoly it gave their members.

[14] This provided that the company would retain their original powers, and imposed additional restrictions on printing; King's Messengers were permitted to enter any home or business in search of illegal presses.

The Committee reported in January 1695, and suggested the renewal of the Licensing Act; this was included in the "Continuation Bill", but rejected by the House of Commons on 11 February.

In response, a second committee was appointed – this one to produce a report indicating why the Commons disagreed with the inclusion of the Licensing Act, and chaired by Edward Clarke.

[25] Locke had spent the early 1690s campaigning against the statute, considering it "ridiculous" that the works of dead authors were held perpetually in copyright.

[26] In letters to Clarke he wrote of the absurdity of the existing system, complaining primarily about the unfairness of it to authors, and "[t]he parallels between Locke's commentary and those reasons presented by the Commons to the Lords for refusing to renew the 1662 Act are striking".

[28] The failure to renew the Licensing Act led to confusion and both positive and negative outcomes; while the government no longer played a part in censoring publications, and the monopoly of the Company over printing was broken, there was uncertainty as to whether or not copyright was a binding legal concept without the legislation.

[15] Economic chaos also resulted; with the company now unable to enforce any monopoly, provincial towns began establishing printing presses, producing cheaper books than the London booksellers.

The absence of the censorship provisions also opened Britain up as a market for internationally printed books, which were similarly cheaper than those British printers could produce.

This bill was essentially a copy of the Licensing Act, but with a narrower jurisdiction; only books covering religion, history, the affairs of the state or the law would require official authorisation.

[31] Four days after its introduction, the Stationers' held an emergency meeting to agree to petition the Commons – this was because the bill did not contain any reference to books as property, eliminating their monopoly on copying.

The first indication of this change in approach comes from the 1706 pamphlet by John How, a stationer, titled Reasons humbly Offer'd for a Bill for the Encouragement of Learning and the Improvement of Printing.

This argued for a return to licensing, not with reference to the printers, but because without something to protect authors and guarantee them an income, "Learned men will be wholly discouraged from Propagating the most useful Parts of Knowledge and Literature".

Defoe's A Review, published on 3 December 1709 and demanding "a Law in the present Parliament ... for the Encouragement of Learning, Arts, and Industry, by securing the Property of Books to the Authors or Editors of them",[37] was followed by How's Some Thoughts on the Present State of Printing and Bookselling, which hoped that Parliament "might think fit to secure Property in Books by a Law".

[37] On 12 December, the Stationers submitted yet another petition asking for legislation on the issue, and the House of Commons gave three MPs – Spencer Compton, Craven Peyton and Edward Wortley – permission to form a drafting committee.

The aims of the resulting statute are debated; Ronan Deazley suggests that the intent was to balance the rights of the author, publisher and public in such a way as to ensure the maximum dissemination of works,[43] while other academics argue that the bill was intended to protect the company's monopoly or, conversely, to weaken it.

One restriction on copyright was a "cumbersome system" designed to prohibit unreasonably high prices for books, which limited how much authors could charge for copies.

The remaining economic power of the company also allowed them to pressure booksellers and distributors into continuing their past arrangements, meaning that even theoretically "public domain" works were, in practise, still treated as copyrighted.

[60] The jury found that the facts submitted by Millar were accurate, and asked the judges to clarify whether common law copyright existed.

The final decision, written by Lord Mansfield and endorsed by Aston and Willes JJ, confirmed that there existed copyright at common law that turned "upon Principles before and independent" of the Statute of Anne, something justified because it was right "that an Author should reap the pecuniary Profits of his own Ingenuity and Labour".

[61] Yates J dissented, on the grounds that the focus on the author obscured the effect this decision would have on "the rest of mankind", which he felt would be to create a virtual monopoly, something that would harm the public and should certainly not be considered "an encouragement of the propagation of learning".

Two Scottish printers, Alexander and John Donaldson, began publishing an unlicensed edition, and Becket successfully obtained an injunction to stop them.

[50] Craig Joyce and Lyman Ray Patterson, writing in the Emory Law Journal, call this a "too simple understanding [that] ignores the statute's source", arguing that it is at best a derivative of the Licensing Act.

[74] Even in the 21st century, the Statute of Anne is "frequently invoked by modern judges and academics as embodying the utilitarian underpinnings of copyright law".

[6] In IceTV v Nine Network,[75] for example, the High Court of Australia noted that the title of the statute "echoed explicitly the emphasis on the practical or utilitarian importance that certain seventeenth-century philosophers attached to knowledge and its encouragement in the scheme of human progress".

The 1790 Act contains provisions for a 14-year term of copyright and sections that provide for authors who published their works before 1790, both of which mirror the protection offered by the statute 80 years previously.