In 2024 the Union Government approved One Nation One Subscription, a scheme to fund national access to commercial journals at a reported cost of six thousand crore rupees over three years. The scheme funds access for the term of the payment. When the payment ends the public retains no copy of what was read. Praharsh and Shravya have previously examined whether the scheme closes the access gap or extends the dependence that produced it. A prior question concerns the law India holds, because India is paying for access its own law once entitled it to require without charge. The case for that reading is historical.
That entitlement rested on a conception of copyright as a bargain in two parts. The State grants the author a limited monopoly, and in return, through another Act, the work enters the permanent record and becomes available, in public libraries, to readers the market excludes. The public’s return is legal deposit; a copy delivered to a library on terms the law sets. For most of copyright’s history that copy was the public’s consideration for the grant.
Deposit as the Price of Copyright
Legal deposit predates copyright. The earliest deposit law is an ordinance of Francis I, signed at Montpellier in December 1537, requiring every printer in France to deliver to the royal library a copy of each new book on pain of confiscation and fine, as Partridge’s 1938 history of legal deposit records (pp. 2 to 3). In England the duty grew up within the licensing of the press. Sir Thomas Bodley secured the first such arrangement through the Stationers’ register in 1610, and the Star Chamber decree of 1637 and the Licensing of the Press Act of 1662 required three copies of every entered book for the royal library and the universities of Oxford and Cambridge (Partridge, ch I).
The Statute of Anne of 1710 carried that practice into the first statutory copyright, and set its bargain out in the preamble. It gave the new right two justifications, that printing a book without the consent of its author or proprietor was to their very great detriment and too often to the ruin of their families, and that the law should encourage learned men to compose and write useful books. Against the monopoly it conferred the Act placed two public-interest provisions. One, in section 4, was a scheme empowering named authorities to lower a book’s price where it was set too high, a power the booksellers resented and Parliament abandoned in 1739. The other was the library deposit, which outlasted the price control and is the surviving form of the public’s side of the 1710 bargain.
The deposit ran to nine copies of every book, on the best paper, to be delivered to the warehouse keeper of the Stationers’ Company before publication, for the royal library, the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, the four universities of Scotland, Sion College and the Faculty of Advocates. The number reflected the Union with Scotland, rose to eleven with the Union with Ireland in 1801, and was reduced to five by the Act of 1836 (Partridge, pp. 33 to 79). Failure to deliver the copies made the printer, the proprietor and the bookseller liable to a fine of the value of the book and five pounds. The deposit clause stood beside a registration clause, the entry of the title in the Stationers’ register before publication, and it was registration that the statutory remedies turned on, the penalties running to the proprietor who had registered and published. Deposit itself, as William Cornish notes, was collateral, not an express condition of protection under the Statute. The coupling of deposit to copyright was made express a century later, by the Copyright Act of 1814, which tied the deposit owed to the privileged libraries to whether the proprietor wished to retain or preserve the exclusive copyright in the work, and the University Copyright Act of 1775 had earlier confirmed the universities’ privilege after the requirement was eluded by the entry only of the title to a single volume.
That the obligation was a price, and was understood as one, shows in the century the trade spent fighting it in the language of a tax upon literature. The campaign, led by Egerton Brydges and Professor Christian and later by James Silk Buckingham, filled Parliament with petitions and produced two Select Committees of the House of Commons, under whose pressure the number of libraries fell from eleven to five in 1836 (Partridge, ch V to VI). The committees put a figure on the privilege, recording the right to the copies as worth about five hundred pounds a year to each library (Partridge, p. 72). The libraries complained that the system brought them the dross of the press while the vital works had to be bought, and the selective deposit the 1814 Act allowed produced absurdities of its own, Oxford and Cambridge rejecting between 1814 and 1817, as worthless, a sonata by Beethoven and verse by Byron (Partridge, pp. 72 to 73).
When the Copyright Act of 1842 settled the scheme, a copy to the British Museum within a month and four more on demand, the duty remained to be collected, and it was Antonio Panizzi, the Keeper of Printed Books, who obtained authority in 1850 to take it up and made a half-collected obligation the principal engine of the national library’s growth. The first United States statute of 1790 also made deposit a condition of copyright, and copyright deposit built the Library of Congress, which Partridge describes as the one library entitled to a free copy of every copyrighted book in the country (Partridge, p. 4).
The Copy Colonial India Sent Abroad
India received the same coupling, and the colonial state used it for imperial purposes. The Indian Copyright Act of 1847, Act No. 20 of 1847, was ancillary to the Imperial Copyright Act of 1842. It contained no provisions about deposit. It required, before copyright in a work could be granted, that the author furnish the title, size and date of the work for entry in a Register of Copyrights. Registration was the condition of copyright in colonial India.
The deposit copy reached the British Museum by a separate route. Until the House of Lords decided Routledge v Low in 1868 the Imperial Act of 1842 was assumed to run throughout the Empire, but few deposit copies came from British India, and Antonio Panizzi, as Keeper at the British Museum, tried without success to induce colonial publishers to comply with sections 6 and 29 of the Act of 1842. The British Museum then came to take its copy of Indian books, in Partridge’s phrase, by a skilful manipulation of legal machinery, through the Press and Registration of Books Act of 1867, Act No. 25 of 1867, in force on 1 July 1867, whose long title described it as an Act for the registration of printing presses and newspapers, for the preservation of books printed in British India, and for the registration of such books. Section 9 required the printer of every book to deliver, within a month and notwithstanding any agreement between printer and publisher, one copy on good paper, with up to two further copies on the local government’s demand within the year, and the definition of a book reached every volume, part of a volume and pamphlet in any language, and every sheet of music, map, chart and plan. The copies so received were, in the Act’s design, for the use of the British Museum or the Secretary of State for India or both, so that the copy owed to the public and the copy owed for copyright were one and the same.
The copyright connection was written into the registration side of the Act. Section 18 required a Catalogue of Books printed in British India, recording for every delivered book fourteen particulars, which ran from the title, language, author and subject to the price and, as the fourteenth, the name and residence of the proprietor of the copyright. The memorandum registered each quarter was published in the local Gazette and a copy sent to the Secretary of State and the Government of India. The original section had required the officer to pay the publisher for the copies at sale price, so that the colonial deposit began as a purchase, and the Government removed the payment in 1890 for reasons of imperial economy, converting it into an unpaid exaction. Default carried a fine not exceeding fifty rupees together with the value of the copies.
Section 11 sent one copy to the Secretary of State for India in London, disposed of another as the Governor General directed, and lodged the third, after registration, in such public library as the local government chose. In practice three copies went to the officer notified for the purpose, usually the Director of Public Instruction of the province, who published a quarterly list and supplied the British Museum and the India Office, the remaining copies going to provincial libraries, Delhi to the Delhi Public Library, Bengal through the Bengal Library to the Imperial Library at Calcutta, and the Punjab to the Punjab Public Library at Lahore. When the Imperial Copyright Act of 1911 repealed the Acts of 1842 and 1886, an Indian Act of 1914 reprinted its delivery provision until that provision was repealed in 1927. Surveying the Empire in 1938, Partridge recorded that India was without a central depository copyright library (Partridge, p. 192).
The colonial administration acknowledged the gap. A Committee of Inquiry at Calcutta in December 1926 recommended that the Imperial Library be a reference library for the future historians of India and a copyright library, the report observing that the case for extending copyright-library privileges to the Imperial Library grew more pressing as the output of books outran the library’s means. Partridge recorded that the scheme had not yet matured. The Imperial Library at Calcutta, renamed the National Library of India in 1948, stands first among the deposit libraries in the statute of independent India.
The next part continues the discussion exploring the post-independence framework of the deposit bargain.
