Per Wordsworth, Talfourd said (and Wordsworth agreed) that English common law had acknowledged perpetual heritable and transferable copyright.
What period of history is that talking about? Before the Licensing of the Press Act 1662? Before the Statute of Anne (1710)? Before the Copyright Act 1814? And is it talking about the sort of thing now called moral rights, or authors’ rights?
Because from what I’ve ever read, it didn’t sound like there was really anything in the way of copyright, no intellectual property law. If you had a manuscript, you could do what you wanted with it, including copying it.
Of course, the printing press upset that balance, by making mass duplication practical, and so ultimately something had to be done. I’m sure there was more depth to the arguments than I can perceive now, but in desiring to go back to perpetual heritable and transferable copyright, it feels like Wordsworth was hankering for an era that was no longer realistic, due to technological development.
We’ve seen a reflection of this issue in the last thirty years, as the cost of mass duplication of digital artefacts has again plummeted, this time to essentially nil.
The genie is out of the bottle.
I’d be curious to know how mainstream among authors Wordsworth’s feeling of perpetual heritable and transferable copyright being a right was.
I wonder how he’d react if he saw what copyright has become. Maybe where it’s ended up isn’t quite what he had in mind. I don’t know. I know nothing of his character or nature.
I do know that I would like the copyright system to be burned to the ground, and go back to something closer to the Statute of Anne. I like this scheme: ten years of free protection, then costing $10 × 1.5ⁿ⁻¹ for each subsequent year—$10, $15, $22.5… you ramp up to a million dollars per year by year 40, so that if it’s actually lucrative you can keep it a bit longer, but otherwise it lapses. Because in practice, copyright is the instrument helping very few people after even ten years.