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Cook, Trevor --- "Exhaustion – A Casualty of the Borderless Digital Era" [2010] ELECD 522; 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 27

Section Title: Exhaustion – A Casualty of the Borderless Digital Era

Author(s): Cook, Trevor

Number of pages: 13

Extract:

27. Exhaustion ­ a casualty of the
borderless digital era
Trevor Cook*

1 THE EARLY YEARS

Some have suggested that the origins of the Statute of Anne may have lain
in part in the efforts of London publishers to reassert control over the par-
allel trade in books from Scotland that had been lost by virtue of the Act
of Union between Scotland and England in 1707.1 Certainly those draft-
ing the Statute were alive to the risk of imports from outside Great Britain,
but though its first clause conferred on its beneficiaries a monopoly, inter
alia, over the import of the books to which it applied (its application to
`any books in Greek, Latin or any other foreign language printed beyond
the seas' being expressly excluded by the seventh clause) the penalties for
import were found to be inadequate to discourage cheap imports from
countries outside the nascent `common market' of England and Scotland
­ notably at that time Ireland and the Netherlands. Accordingly, 30 years
later, it proved necessary to pass in 1739 `An Act for Prohibiting the
Importation of Books reprinted abroad and first composed or written
and printed in Great Britain and for limiting the Prices of Books'. This
increased the penalties for such import and clause 1 of this expressly pro-
hibited importing for sale those works `first printed, composed or written
or published in Great Britain'.2 The following century also saw numer-
ous legislative attempts, notably through a series of Customs Acts, to deal
...