It can not, we think, be doubted, by a student of those times, * that whatever literary property existed {108}at common law then existed in the shape of a license to print a work under permission of the Stationers' Company; that no estate or property obtained in anything except the types, ink, paper, in the license to use them all together to make a book, and in the resulting volume; and that what we understand by "copyright" to-day--namely, an author's or a proprietor's right to demand a royalty or percentage, or to exercise other control over the work when once printed and published--was altogether unconceived and unclaimed. * See "Omitted Chapters of the History of England," by Andrew Basset, 1864 ** "The person who first resolved on printing a book, and entered his design on that register, became thereby the legal proprietor of that work, and had the sole right of printing it."--Carte, quoted in "Reasons for a Further Amendment of the Act 54, George III., c. 15," London, 1817. John Camden Hotten, "Seven Letters, Etc., on Literary Property," London, Hotten, 1871, describes the modern Stationers' Company as entrusted with "a vested interest over somebody else's property, a prescriptive right to interfere with the future work of other people's hands." We are aware that this statement as to the condition of authors' rights in the days of Elizabeth will not pass unchallenged; but a review of the reported cases, as well as the extant records of the Stationers' Company, will, we think, support our conclusion. The first reported case of piracy was in 1735, when the Master of the Rolls enjoined publication of "The whole Duty of Man" (Morgan's "Law of Literature," vol. ii., p. 672). Whatever compensation the author of a work was able to obtain, he doubtless obtained beforehand, by sale of his manuscript, and dreamed not of setting up a tangible property as against any one who had obtained the Stationers' Company's license to print it. The Stationers' Company, at the outset of their career, opened a record, in which it entered the name of every book it licensed--the date, and the name of the person authorized to print it. * It was not until 1644, twenty-eight years after William Shakespeare's death (so far as we can ever know) that John Milton, in his "Are-opagitica"--the greatest state paper in the republic {109}of letters, the declaration of independence, and the bill of rights of the liberty of literature--asserted * ** for the first time "the right of every man" to "his several copy, which God forbid should be gainsayd." * For the text of the "Areopagitica" and copious notes as to the history of the days which called it out, see edition of J. VV. Hale's, Clarendon Press Series, Macmillan & Co., Oxford, 1874. ** In a pamphlet, "The Prayse of the Red Herring" cited by Farmer, in his "Learning of Shakespeare," page 45.