Дело Дональдсон против Бекета: История авторского права и правописания имени ответчика.

Court case

Donaldson v Becket (1774) 2 Brown's Parl. Cases (2d ed.) 129, 1 Eng. Rep. 837; 4 Burr. 2408, 98 Eng. Rep. 257; 17 Cobbett's Parl. Hist. 953 is the ruling by the British House of Lords that held that copyright in published works was not perpetual but was subject to statutory limits. Some scholars disagree on the reasoning behind the decision.

The spelling of the chief respondent in the case, Thomas Becket, sometimes appears as Beckett. For those looking to choose one spelling over the other, it would be more correct to use Becket. Firstly, Becket overwhelmingly spelled his surname t, not tt. Secondly, many of the original contemporaneous records in the case also spelled his surname Becket. Those records include the original proceedings of the dispute in the Court of Chancery. Additionally, the manuscript records of the appeal in the House of Lords, including the manuscript minutes and manuscript journal of the House of Lords, caption the case using the spelling Becket, but sometimes in the text of the proceedings used the spelling Beckett. The earliest reports of the case, those prepared by James Burrow in 1776 and Josiah Brown (1st edition) in 1783, also spelled his surname Becket. The "Beckett" variation seems to have gained ground from a decision made in 1803 by T. E. Tomlins, the editor of the second edition of Brown's report of the case, to change the spelling to Beckett in the caption and then to a decision made by the clerk of the journals in the House of Lords, when the House printed its manuscript journal in around 1806, to do the same.

The first recognizably modern copyright statute was the Statute of Anne (8 Ann. c. 21) (1710), in which Parliament granted a fourteen year term for a copyright, extendable once for another 14 years if the author was still alive at the expiration of the first term. Parliament also provided a special grandfather clause allowing those works already published before the statute to enjoy twenty one years of protection. When the twenty one years were up, the booksellers—for copyrights in published works were usually held and exploited by publishers and booksellers—asked for an extension. Parliament declined to grant it. Thwarted by Parliament, the booksellers turned to the courts for relief. They attempted to secure a ruling that there was a natural or customary right to ownership of the copyright under the common law. The booksellers arranged a collusive lawsuit, Tonson v Collins, but the courts threw it out. A second lawsuit was later brought, Millar v Taylor 4 Burr. 2303, 98 Eng. Rep. 201 (K. B. 1769), concerning infringement of the copyright on James Thomson's poem "The Seasons" by Robert Taylor, and the booksellers won a favourable 3 1 judgment. (Lord Mansfield, the chief judge on the case, had previously been counsel to the copyright holding booksellers in various suits filed in the Court of Chancery in the 1730s. Justice Yates, the dissenting judge in Millar v. Taylor, had himself previously been counsel to the challengers of common law copyright in Tonson v. Collins.) Donaldson v Becket was brought regarding the same poem at issue in Millar and an injunction was granted by the Court of Chancery on the precedent of Millar v. Taylor. An appeal from the Chancery decree was carried to the House of Lords, which at that time functioned as the United Kingdom's court of final appeal, in February 1774.

Counsel was heard on 4, 7–9 February. Seven months previously, in the case of Hinton v Donaldson, the Scots Court of Session had ruled that copyright did not exist in the common law of Scotland, so that Alexander Donaldson (an appellant in Donaldson v. Becket with his elder brother, John) could lawfully publish Thomas Stackhouse's New History of the Holy Bible. Attorney General Thurlow, speaking for the appellants, referred to the Scottish case in his opening argument to the Lords on 4 February: [Attorney General Thurlow] concluded his speech with a compliment to his learned coadjutor, and a hope, that as the lords of session in Scotland had freed that country from a monopoly which took its rise from the chimerical idea of the actuality of literary property, their lordships, whom he addressed, would likewise, by a decree of a similar nature, rescue the cause of literature and authorship from the hands of a few monopolizing booksellers.