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Page Number: 49

4 

GOLAN v. HOLDER 

BREYER, J., dissenting 

‘learned Men to compose and write useful Books’ the state
would  provide  a  guaranteed,  if  temporally  limited,  right
to  print  and  reprint  those  works.”    Deazley,  The  Myth  of 
Copyright  at  Common  Law,  62  Camb.  L. J.  106,  108 
(2003).  At first, in their attempts to minimize their losses,
the booksellers argued that authors had a perpetual com­
mon-law  copyright  in  their  works  deriving  from  their 
natural  rights  as  creators.    But  the  House  of  Lords  ulti­
mately  held  in  Donaldson  v.  Beckett,  1  Eng.  Rep.  837
(1774), that the Statute of Anne had transformed any such
perpetual  common-law  copyright  into  a  copyright  of  a 
limited term designed to serve the public interest.  Patter­
son 15–16, 153, 158–179; Deazley, supra, at 114–126. 

Many  early  colonial  copyright  statutes,  patterned  after
the Statute of Anne, also stated that copyright’s objective
was  to  encourage  authors  to  produce  new  works  and 
thereby  improve  learning.  See  U. S.  Copyright  Office,
Copyright Enactments, Bulletin No. 3, pp. 1, 6, 10, 11, 17, 
19 (rev. 1963) (statutes of Connecticut, New Jersey, Penn­
sylvania,  South  Carolina,  Georgia,  and  New  York);  Wal­
terscheid 74–75; Bracha, The Adventures of the Statute of 
Anne in the Land of Unlimited Possibilities: The Life of a 
Legal  Transplant,  25  Berkeley  Tech.  L. J.  1427,  1444–
1450 (2010).

At  least,  that  was  the  predominant  view  expressed  to,
or by, the Founders.  Patterson 93.  Thomas Jefferson, for 
example,  initially  expressed  great  uncertainty  as  to
whether  the  Constitution  should  authorize  the  grant  of 
copyrights  and  patents  at  all,  writing  that  “the  benefit 
even  of  limited  monopolies  is  too  doubtful”  to  warrant 
anything  other  than  their  “suppression.”    Letter  from 
Thomas Jefferson to James Madison (July 31, 1788), in 13
Papers  of  Thomas  Jefferson  440,  443  (J.  Boyd  ed.  1956). 
James  Madison  also  thought  that  “Monopolies  . . .  are 
justly  classed  among  the  greatest  nu[i]sances  in  Govern­
ment.”  Letter  from  James  Madison  to  Thomas  Jefferson