Copyright history has become a burgeoning field, yet it has long been dominated by scholarship regarding books. That has changed in recent years, with the first book-length studies of copyright protecting drama (D. Miller, Copyright and the Value of Performance, 2019) and the visual arts (E. Cooper, Art and Modern Copyright, 2018; K. Scott, Becoming Property, 2018). Will Slauter's Who Owns the News? should be set in the context of this recent turn in scholarship which, in shifting the focus away from books, provides fresh perspectives on copyright and its history.
Slauter's work is the first study of the history of legal protection for news in Britain and the United States. Its subtitle presents it as “a history of copyright,” which it undoubtedly is, but it also offers far more. First, drawing on original research and impressive in its disciplinary breadth, the book uncovers the intertwining of law and publishing practice and “sheds light on the history of both” (13). Second, as a history of law, Slauter's work encompasses not just copyright, but also the subtle ways in which copyright related to other bodies of law, including censorship, newspaper taxes, postal regulation, and unfair competition. Third, the book tells a story of the past that speaks to the present, demonstrating history's continuing relevance. For example, recent European Union debates about the press publishers’ right (introduced by the Digital Single Market Directive 2019/790) are for Slauter “another chapter” in a “centuries-old history” (281).
The book is held together elegantly by the introductory and concluding chapters, which draw together past and present. The middle chapters explore episodes in the history of law and news publishing practice from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries. The international story—the treatment of news under the Berne Convention (first concluded in 1886)—perhaps could have been more fully developed, but the meticulous detail of the national stories more than mitigates this.
Chapter 1 explores the regulation of news and other written works in sixteenth- to seventeenth-century Britain, by royal privileges—exclusive rights to print a particular work—and licensing, as censorship laws required approval by a government licensor before publication. Chapter 2 turns to eighteenth-century Britain. The first Copyright Act (1709) protected “books,” with no mention of newspapers and periodicals. After the 1709 Act, it was not assumed that news was excluded from copyright protection, yet the business and culture of news worked against protection: newspapers relied on copying and were sold on subscription and financed by advertising. Furthermore, anonymity was widespread: writers assumed a “depersonalised voice,” because of the risk of seditious libel prosecutions and a cultural wish “to speak on behalf of the public” (65).
Chapters 3 and 4 concern the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. These chapters introduce the enduring image of “scissors editors.” With copying essential to newspaper production, editors used scissors to cut out articles from rival newspapers, deciding which parts of other papers would be reprinted to fit the space available. In the years following the American Revolution, legislative policy favored the facilitation of news circulation; copyright policy was a “counterpart” to postal regulation as instruments that “enabled news to spread” (88). Accordingly, although the Copyright Act of 1790 protected “maps, charts and books,” there is no evidence that lawmakers considered newspapers to be included.
During the 1800s, newspaper editors remained uninterested in copyright, but they did expect credit to be given to the first newspaper that published a story. This change in attitude toward acknowledgement, when coupled with later changes in business practice, including the telegraph and the emergence of press associations, led some editors to seek legal protection. Chapters 6 and 7 discuss the protection of news by United States copyright and unfair competition law during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including the 1918 case of International News Service v. Associated Press.
Intervening in this United States analysis, Chapter 5 presents the contrasting story of the protection of news in nineteenth-century Britain. The British regulatory context was different from that in the United States: newspapers in Britain were taxed, and newspaper editors were concerned that the proposed end to these “taxes on knowledge” would make way for cheap newspapers that would copy news and compete with the newspapers that collected it. Accordingly, as early as the 1830s, well before the emergence of the telegraph, newspaper editors campaigned (unsuccessfully) for special short-term copyright protection for news. Chapter 5 explores these proposals alongside the Literary Copyright Act of 1842 and the cases Walter v. Steinkopff (1892) and Walter v. Lane (1900).
Overall, this book is a fascinating read, providing fresh insight into the history of law and publishing regarding news and a nuanced engagement with copyright debates today. It will appeal not just to scholars of law and the humanities, but also to legal practitioners and policy makers grappling with the challenges posed by the legal protection of news today.
