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Deazley, Ronan --- "What’s New About the Statute of Anne? Or Six Observations in Search of an Act" [2010] ELECD 498; in Bently, Lionel; Suthersanen, Uma; Torremans, Paul (eds), "Global Copyright" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2010)

Book Title: Global Copyright

Editor(s): Bently, Lionel; Suthersanen, Uma; Torremans, Paul

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781848447660

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: What’s New About the Statute of Anne? Or Six Observations in Search of an Act

Author(s): Deazley, Ronan

Number of pages: 28

Extract:

3. What's new about the Statute of
Anne? or Six observations in search
of an act
Ronan Deazley*

1 INTRODUCTION

When I was invited to present at the ALAI Congress 2009, the broad
focus of my paper had been predetermined. One of the conference organ-
isers wrote to me asking `whether [I] would talk about the impact of [the]
Statute of Anne, and in particular whether there is anything "new" in the
sense of the lessons that the Statute teaches us' in relation to contempo-
rary copyright law. In short, my brief was to consider the following ques-
tion: `What's new about the Statute of Anne?' As the time approached
for writing this paper, and while conscious of remaining within my pre-
scribed brief, I decided to grant myself the indulgence of a subtitle: Six
Observations in Search of an Act.
That subtitle, of course, is taken from Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters
in Search of an Author, nor am I the first within the copyright commu-
nity to draw upon Pirandello. David Nimmer, in his lengthy article on
`Copyright in the Dead Sea Scrolls', presented `Six Case Studies in Search
of an Author'.1 More recently, Jane Ginsburg, in her comparative analysis
of the concept of authorship in copyright law, elaborated `Six Principles
in Search of an Author', while at the same time alerting us to the fact that
`[r]eferences in copyright scholarship to Pirandello risk becoming trite'.2
While heedful of Prof Ginsburg's warning, ...