Pope v Curll
| Pope v Curll, also: Pope v Curl | ||||
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| Court of Chancery | ||||
| Decided on June 17, 1741 |
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| facts | ||||
| Lower courts | ||||
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| decision | ||||
| Granting an injunction in favor of the plaintiff | ||||
| Ratio decidendi | ||||
| occupation | ||||
| Majority opinion: Hardwicke LC | ||||
| Agreeing: | ||||
| Dissent: | ||||
| Applied laws / precedents | ||||
| 8 An. c. 19th |
Pope v Curll (1741) is a court case before the Court of Chancery from 1741. For the first time, an English court differentiated between the objective object and the content of a literary work with the resulting mastery of the author.
facts
The publisher Edmund Curll published a collective work entitled Dean Swift's Literary Correspondence for 24 years from 1714-1738. It contained letters from Jonathan Swift , both to and from Alexander Pope . Pope resisted this publication. Represented by William Murray (later Lord Mansfield) he demanded an injunction to prohibit the publication of the anthology as well as any new or different edition or publication of the letters.
Curll put forward three arguments in his defense: Firstly, Pope was not the author of the said letters at all, and they were not subject to the Act of Anne . Most recently, he argued that all said letters had already been published in Ireland and that anyone could reprint works from Ireland in the same way as Irish publishers were first published in Great Britain.
Decision of the Court of Chancery
The Earl of Hardwicke LC largely followed Pope's argument in his judgment.
The publication is initially subject to the Act of Anne. Its scope not only included literary works and non-fiction books intended for publication, but also private letters. Curll's objection that the letters are to be regarded as a gift from the sender to the recipient was refuted by the Lord Chancellor with the distinction between "physical letter and copyright"; Accordingly, the recipient only has property on the paper of the letter, which, however, does not result in any permission to print the contents of the letter. Nor could the previous publication in Ireland change anything in the result found: if this were the case, the provisions of the Act of Anne could simply be circumvented by a British publisher first sending the work intended for publication to Ireland and having it printed there. The court therefore granted an injunction for Pope's letters to Swift, but not for Swift's letters to Pope.
literature
- Ronan Deazley: Rethinking Copyright: History, Theory, Language . Edward Elgar, London 2006, ISBN 978-1-84542-282-0 , pp. 71 ff .
- Mark Rose : Authors and Owners . Harvard University Press, 1993, ISBN 978-0-674-05309-0 , pp. 60 ff .