Soru

While standard legal histories often characterize the 1710 Statute of Anne as a sudden, principled triumph of authors' natural rights over the monopolistic control of the Stationers' Company, recent scholarship suggests a more pragmatic evolution. The Stationers' Company, which had lost its lucrative licensing monopoly in 1695, aggressively lobbied for the new statute not out of a sudden respect for authorial genius, but as a mechanism to regain regulatory control over the increasingly chaotic book trade. The statute's subsequent inclusion of the author as the initial copyright holder—a feature often heralded as a philosophical shift toward John Locke's labor theory of property—was primarily a politically palatable compromise. It allowed publishers to continue dominating the trade by merely requiring them to purchase these newly created authorial rights, thereby securing legally enforceable exclusivity without appearing to revive an unpopular monopoly.

Based on the passage, which of the following accurately describe the rhetorical function of the author's reference to the fact that the Stationers' Company 'had lost its lucrative licensing monopoly in 1695'? Select all that are correct.