History of Copyright Changes 1710–2013

When the ‘Act for the Encouragement of learned Men to compose and write useful books’ was established in 1710, the main beneficiaries were printers and booksellers to whom the rights were assigned. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it continued to be booksellers, printers and publishers who reaped the most financial reward from the process, although the writers eventually began to benefit. Calder points out that it was only in the twentieth century that contracts more commonly began to include royalties for copies sold and percentage splits for rights sales.