Technology and Copyright in 1735: The Engraver's Act

Abstract

Without printing technology there would be no need for copyright. Anglo-American copyright has its roots in early booksellers' practices that in 1710 were incorporated into the Statute of Anne. Several decades later in 1735 the provisions of this statute were copied in a new piece of legislation for the protection of engravings. However, “Hogarth's Act” protected only those engravings that involved original designs and thus, implicitly, made a distinction between artists and mere craftsmen. Soon, however, Parliament was persuaded to extend protection to all engravings. The history of Hogarth's Act foreshadowed the logic whereby a century later protection was extended first to special and then to ordinary photographs. Together these instances of copyright extension raise the question of to what degree similar patterns are at work in the continuing expansion of copyright today.

Keywords:

• copyright
• design
• eighteenth century
• Engravers' Act of 1735
• engraving
• photography
• technology
• William Hogarth

Notes

¹See generally Mark Rose, Authors and owners: The invention of copyright (Cambridge, MA, 1993) and L. Ray Patterson, Copyright in historical perspective (Nashville, 1968). On the booksellers' guild see Cyprian Blagden, The stationers' company: A history, 1403–1959 (London, 1960).

²See generally David Hunter, Copyright protection for engravings and maps in eighteenth-century Britain, The Library, ser. 6, v. 9 (1987), pp. 128–147.

³On Hogarth as an engraver see generally Ronald Paulson, Hogarth's graphic works (New Haven, CT, 1965) and Hogarth: His life, art, and times (New Haven, CT, 1971).

⁴ The case of designers, engravers, etchers, etc., stated in a letter to a member of parliament (London, c. 1735; reprinted New York, 1975).

⁵See, for example, D. J. Gordon, The renaissance imagination, ed. Stephen Orgel (Berkeley, CA, 1975), who discusses how the idea of disegno figured in the architect Inigo Jones's desire to avoid being considered “merchanick” (p. 90).

⁶Jane M. Gaines discusses the process of abstraction at work in Burrow–Giles in contested culture: The image, the voice, and the law(Chapel Hill, NC, 1991), pp. 42–83.

⁷See Hunter, p. 135.