who is admitted tenant of lands or tenements within a manor, which time out of mind, by use and custom of the manor, have been demilable, and demised to such as will take them in fee-simple or fee-tail, for life, years, or at will, according to the custom of the manor by copy of court-roll; but is generally where the tenant has such estate either in fee or for three lives.

Copy-Right, the right which an author may be supposed to have in his own original literary compositions; so that no other person, without his leave, may publish or make profit of the copies. When a man by the exertion of his rational powers has produced an original work, he has clearly a right to dispose of that identical work as he pleases; and any attempt to take it from him, or vary the disposition he has made of it, is an invasion of his right of property. Now the identity of a literary composition consists entirely in the sentiment and the language; the same conceptions, cloathed in the same words, must necessarily be the same composition; and whatever method be taken of conveying that composition to the ear, or to the eye of another, by recital, by writing, or by printing, in any number of copies, or at any period of time, it is always the identical work of the author which is so conveyed; and no other man (it hath been thought) can have a right to convey or transfer it without his consent, either tacitly or expressly given. This content may perhaps be tacitly given when an author permits his work to be published without any reserve of right, and without stamping on it any marks of ownership; it is then a present to the public, like the building of a church, or the laying out a new highway: but in case of a bargain for a single impression, or a total sale or gift of the copyright; in the one case the reversion hath been thought to continue in the original proprietor; in the other the whole property, with its exclusive rights, to be perpetually transferred to the grantee. On the other hand it is urged, that though the exclusive right of the manuscript, and all which it contains, belongs undoubtedly to the owner, before it is printed or published; yet from the instant of publication, the exclusive right of an author or his assigns to the sole communication of his ideas immediately vanishes and evaporates; as being a right of too subtile and unsubstantial a nature to become the subject of property at the common law, and only capable of being guarded by positive statute and special provisions of the magistracy.

The Roman law adjudged, that if one man wrote any thing, though ever so elegantly, on the paper or parchment of another, the writing should belong to the original owner of the materials on which it was written: meaning certainly nothing more thereby than the mere mechanical operation of writing, for which it directed the scribe to receive a satisfaction; especially as, in works of genius and invention, such as a picture painted on another man's canvas, the same law gave the canvas to the painter. We find no other mention in the law of any property in the works of the understanding, though the sale of literary copies, for the purposes of recital or multiplication, is certainly as ancient as the times of Terence, Martial, and Statius. Neither with us in Britain hath there been (till very lately) any final determination upon the right of authors at the common law. It was determined in the case of Miller v. Taylor in B. R. Pash. 9 Geo. III. 1769, that an exclusive copy-right in authors subsisted by the common law. But afterwards...