Nario paskyra

In particular, they opposed the practice known as legal deposit. This was a requirement that a number of copies of each book published in Britain had to be turned over to select libraries for their collections. It was written into the statute law of copyright — which is why we still call the beneficiaries "copyright libraries" to this day. The rule had long been something of a dead letter, but the libraries had recently attempted to collect on it. The Brydges camp maintained that this aggressive demand was a real infraction on property, and that if successful it would kill off all Britain's most valuable publishing ventures. In principle, the deposit promised to realize the potential of print for enlightenment by creating universal libraries; in practice, Brydges's side argued, it was an "evil" doomed to destroy that potential. They maintained that in late Georgian London copyright had given rise to a plot for public-interest piracy on a massive scale. And so they concluded that the law underpinning that plot — the law of copyright-had to go.

— Piracy Adrian Johns