Soru

Prior to the early eighteenth century, the English book trade was dominated by the Stationers’ Company, a powerful guild of printers and booksellers that held a near-absolute monopoly on publishing. Under the licensing system, rights were held by the publisher rather than the creator, and these rights were perpetual. Authors, generally viewed merely as suppliers of raw manuscript material, had little control over their work once sold and no legal avenue to claim a share of the continuous profits generated by successful books.

The landscape shifted dramatically with the passage of the Statute of Anne in 1710, commonly heralded as the world’s first modern copyright law. Ostensibly titled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning," the Statute fundamentally disrupted the Stationers’ monopoly by legally recognizing the author as the primary holder of the right to print and reprint a book. Crucially, the Statute replaced the perpetual rights enjoyed by publishers with a limited term of protection. For newly published books, authors were granted exclusive rights for a term of fourteen years, which could be renewed for an additional fourteen years provided the author was still living at the expiration of the first term. For books already in print prior to the Statute, a single twenty-one-year term was established.

Despite its revolutionary premise, the immediate practical effect of the Statute on authors' livelihoods was somewhat muted. Because the infrastructure of publishing and distribution remained firmly in the hands of the booksellers, publishers simply adapted to the new legal framework by insisting that authors unconditionally assign their fourteen-year copyright to the publisher as a prerequisite for publication. Thus, while the legal locus of ownership shifted to the creator, the economic reality of the book trade meant that publishers continued to reap the lion's share of profits.

Nevertheless, the Statute of Anne precipitated a profound philosophical shift. By establishing that copyright was a temporary grant designed to incentivize creation rather than a perpetual property right inherent to publishers, it laid the groundwork for the modern conceptualization of intellectual property. This temporary nature of the right was deliberately calculated to balance the author's need for financial reward against the public's interest in having eventual unhindered access to cultural and scientific works. Consequently, once a book's statutory term expired, it entered the public domain, a concept that was formalized through these very legal disputes.

According to the passage, what specific duration of copyright protection did the Statute of Anne explicitly grant to newly published books?