In 1769 a copyright which had been issued under the statute of Anne had expired, and the owner of that copyright determined to test the question in the English courts as to whether or not there was a perpetual right of copyright under the common law of England, regardless of the statute of Anne, and the owners of that copyright brought suit for its infringement after the term established by the statute of Anne had expired; and the question whether such a common-law right existed or not came before the court of king's bench when Lord Mansfield was chief justice of that court. The court of king's bench decided, as an academic proposition, that there had been anciently an exclusive right to an intellectual production under the laws of England. That was, however, a purely speculative statement. They could not point to the time when anybody asserted any such right or to an instance when anybody had acquiesced in it. They simply took the ground, as an academic proposition, that anciently there had been such a right. They also decided, however, that whether that right existed or not, it had been ended by the statute of Anne, and that the statute of Anne circumscribed the right to the limited time provided for by that statute. From that decision or the court of king's bench the plaintiff appealed to the House of Lords, sitting in its judicial capacity. We sometimes have the notion that when the House of Lords sits in its judicial capacity all the peers of the Realm--500 in number--assemble together and hear the arguments and render a final decision, but it is not so. Only the law lords participate; and if an ordinary nobleman should venture to sit when the House of Lords was sitting in its judicial capacity he would be hooted out of the room, and his presence would be made to appear to him to be extremely unwelcome. The number of law lords that sat at the time of the hearing of that argument was 11, and 6 of them rendered the opinion that the statute of Anne was the only foundation known to the law of England for exclusive right to an intellectual production, and that therefore the plaintiff was not entitled to recover. That was the situation of the laws of England at the time of the foundation of our Union, at the time of the Declaration of Independence, and at the time of the framing of our Constitution. In 1787 our Constitution was framed, and the fathers inserted in that Constitution this provision: The Congress shall have power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts by securing, for limited times, to authors and inventors, the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.