Thomas Babington Macaulay

Thomas Babington Macaulay against Talfourd's Copyright Bill, February 5, 1841 Talfourd's bill would have stretched copyright to sixty years after an author's death. Macaulay answered with a closely reasoned case that copyright is a monopoly, "a tax on readers for the purpose of giving a bounty to writers," worth paying only as far as it buys new books. The Commons threw the bill out by 45 votes to 38, a result his biographers credit to him. A year later he won again: the House came round to his alternative term of forty-two years from publication, and the law that passed was remodeled around it. Few speeches have so direct a paper trail from argument to statute.