works.
The crown's powerùgenerally and over copyrightùebbed during the intervening centuries and Parliament stepped in. During the 1720s, a group of publishers challenged the law by mounting a novel legal case, the result of which frames the terms of the copyright debate to this day. A publisher argued that he had purchased the copyright to a work from the author, and as such, asked the court to enjoin another publishing from printing the same work. The basis for this right was common law, which gave farmers perpetual rights in their real property because they had mixed their labor with the soil. The publishers argued that the common law conferred similar rights upon the authors of books, and that right could be transferred.
This conflicted with parliament's law, which conferred a copyright for a set amount of time. This debate lasted more than four decades, until an appeal to the House of Lords resulted in a finding that no such natural right existed, and parliament's law (in which authors enjoyed copyright protection for 28 years) took precedence.
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