Page:Copyright, Its History And Its Law (1912).djvu/41

 faith were kept, — was the work-shop of the monkish copyists, sometimes working as a publishing staff under the direction of the librarius or armarius as chief scribe. The first record of a copyright case is that of Finnian v. Columba in 567, chronicled by Adamnan fifty years later and cited by Montalem-bert in "The monks of the West." St. Columba, in his pre-saintly days, surreptitiously made a copy of a psalter in possession of his teacher Finnian, and the copy was reclaimed, so the tradition relates, under the decision of King Dermott, in the Halls of Tara: "To every cow her calf." The authenticity of the tradition is questioned by other writers, but the phrase gives the pith of the common law doctrine of literary property and indicates that in those early centuries there was a sense of copyright. Monks from other monasteries came to a noted scriptorium where a specially authentic or valuable manuscript could be copied, and the privilege of copying some-times became the basis of an exchange of copies or of a commercial charge. Finally different texts of the same work were compared to obtain a certain or standard text, and the multiplication of such copies became the basis of a publishing and bookselling trade, in secular as well as sacerdotal hands, the de-velopment of which is traced in detail by George Haven Putnam in "Books and their makers in the Middle Ages."

This development is illustrated in the statutes of 1223 of the University of Paris, providing that the "booksellers of the University" should produce duplicate copies of the texts authorized for the use of the University, and there is indication that payment was made by the University to scholars for the anno- tation and proof-reading of such texts. In fact, there existed in France in those days a kind of guild of