6 - Domestic problems

Summary

The first observation which a study of the existing law suggests is that its form, as distinguished from its substance, seems to us bad. The law is wholly destitute of any sort of arrangement, incomplete, often obscure, and even when it is intelligible upon long study, it is in many parts so ill-expressed that no one who does not give such study to it can expect to understand it.

This was the frank assessment of the 1878 Royal Commission, following its thorough review of ‘Home Copyright’. What is striking about domestic copyright law throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, and even into the beginning of the twentieth century, is how little could be done to address its widely admitted defects. Talfourd's vision even as early as 1837 had been of a grand consolidating bill. He was obliged to curtail his original scheme significantly, and, given the opposition which had been faced, the achievements of the 1842 Act were in one sense considerable. Yet, viewed as a platform which, by default, had to serve for almost seventy years as a basis for Britain's copyright law in a period of rapid economic and intellectual change, the 1842 Act was defective in many ways, and grew yet more so as the century progressed. Fundamental aspects of domestic copyright law were dispersed among numerous statutes which lacked consistency of purpose. Nor was the international sphere adequately addressed, either with regard to Britain's colonies, or to foreign states.