What is the Point of Copyright History?:Reflections on Copyright at Common law in 1774 by H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui

Copyright history has long been a subject of intense and contested enquiry. Historical narratives about the early development of copyright were first prominently mobilised in eighteenth century British legal discourse, during the so-called Battle of the Booksellers between Scottish and London publishers. The two landmark copyright decisions of that time – Millar v. Taylor (1769) and Donaldson v. Becket (1774) – continue to provoke debate today. The orthodox reading of Millar and Donaldson presents copyright as a natural proprietary right at common law inherent in authors. Revisionist accounts dispute that traditional analysis. These conflicting perspectives have, once again, become the subject of critical scrutiny with the publication of Copyright at Common Law in 1774 by Prof Tomas Gomez-Arostegui in 2014, in the Connecticut Law Review ((2014) 47 Conn. L. Rev. 1) and as a CREATe Working Paper (No. 2014/16, 3 November 2014).

Taking Prof Gomez-Arostegui’s extraordinary work in this area as a point of departure, Dr Elena Cooper and Professor Ronan Deazley (then both academics at CREATe) organised an event, held at the University of Glasgow on 26th and 27th March 2015, to consider the interplay between copyright history and contemporary copyright policy. Is Donaldson still relevant, and, if so, why? What justificatory goals are served by historical investigation, and what might be learned from the history of the history of copyright? Does the study of copyright history still have any currency within an evidence-based policy context that is increasingly preoccupied with economic impact analysis?

This paper provides a lasting record of these discussions, including an editorial introduction, written comments by each of the panelists and Prof. Gomez-Arostegui and an edited transcript of the Symposium debate.

Official histories of parliament and the nature of the union of 1707:a forgotten episode in Anglo-Scottish academic relations

The Scottish Committee on the History of Parliament was established in 1936 as an offshoot of Col. Josiah Wedgwood's scheme for a collaborative ‘history of parliament’ researched and written on biographical lines. Circumstances, however, determined that the Scottish history would take a separate path. When Wedgwood's scheme was revived in 1951 an unsuccessful attempt was made to reintegrate the two projects. Discussions between the respective managing committees were conflicted and often bad-tempered, focussing on different interpretations of the nature of the united parliament created in 1707. The Scottish committee insisted that it was a new constitutional entity, while the English saw it as a continuation of the Westminster parliament with Scottish MPs added. This story of mutual incomprehension illustrates the profound differences between Scottish and English academics in the writing of parliamentary history, and also reveals a hitherto unobserved element in the development among leading Scottish jurists of a strain of ‘legal nationalism’ based on their interpretation of the constitutional significance of the Union.