Limited Monopoly Privilege – Jessie Salfen & Gilbert Woods
Limited monopoly privilege is best described as the first version of copyright. Modeled after Great Britain’s Statute of Anne to manage book trading, limited monopoly privilege was developed reluctantly by Thomas Jefferson and the farmers of the Constitution who recognized that the concept of cultural property, though difficult to define, required some form of regulation. To put protective law on intellectual property is difficult because ideas are intangible. Where thoughts lack a physical being like that of a printed book or a chair, they do have tremendous potential and could spark even greater ideas that could, potentially, greatly benefit society. If a creator feared exploitation of his or her idea by others, they were likely to simply not publish or share their work. It was then decided that to provide creators with temporary exclusive rights and legal protection to their creations would encourage further creation of new cultural entities. Limited monopoly privilege was stressed to be an interim period, establishing monetary support to cultural creators for a window of time before their work, and ideally additional work, became free to all and part of our collective heritage. Until 1978 copyright in the styling of limited monopoly privilege was in practice mostly for books, charts and maps until a new definition of copyright’s scope was expanded to “apply to any ‘expression’ that has been ‘fixed’ to any medium” and even further deviated from the intended limitations, allowing copyright to extend to 70 years.
