n lithographed for private circulation, fell
into the hands of the defendant, a London publisher, who proposed to
exhibit them, and issued a catalogue entitled _A Descriptive Catalogue
of the Royal Victoria and Albert Gallery of Etchings_. The court of
chancery restrained the publication of the catalogue, holding that
property in mechanical works, or works of art, does certainly subsist,
and is invaded, before publication, not only by copying but by
description or catalogue. This protection includes news (_Exchange
Telegraph Co._ v. _Central News_, 1897).

Nature of right.

As a matter of principle, the nature of copyright itself, and the
reasons why it should be recognized in law, have, as already stated,
been the subject of bitter dispute. It was attacked as constituting a
monopoly, and it has been argued that copyright should be looked upon as
a doubtful exception to the general law regulating trade, and should be
strictly limited in point of duration. On the other hand, it is claimed
that copyright, being in the nature of personal property, should be
perpetual. A man's own work, in this view, is as much _his_ as his house
or his money, and should be protected by the state. Historically, and in
legal definition, there would appear to be no doubt that copyright, as
regulated by statute, is strictly a monopoly. The parliamentary
protection of works of art for the period of fourteen years by an act of
1709 and later statutes appears, as Blackstone points out, to have been
suggested by the exception in the Statute of Monopolies 1623. The object
of that statute was to suppress the royal grants of exclusive right to
trade in certain articles, and to reassert in relation to all such
monopolies the common law of the land. Certain exceptions were made on
grounds of public policy, and among others it was allowed that a royal
patent of privilege might be granted for fourteen years "to any inventor
of a new manufacture for the sole working or making of the same."
Copyright, like patent right, would be covered by the legal definition
of a monopoly. It is a mere right to prevent other people from
manufacturing certain articles. But objections to monopolies in general
do not apply to this particular class of cases, in which the author of a
new work in literature or art has the right of preventing others from
manufacturing copies thereof and selling them to the public. The rights
of persons licensed to sell spirits, to hold the