'ALL   RIGHTS   RESERVED'
right to directories, railway time-tables and Stock Ex-
change quotations.    What a shocking thing it would
be, Mr. Birrell remarked, if some great orator, arguing
a national cause, or some preacher with his message to
humanity, ended up with the words, 'All rights reserved.*
Street  directories,  he  said, were rightly copyright as
being the result of 'independent labour and research*
quite as much as that of the historian who searched the
Anglo-Saxon chronicles, but a transcriber—that was a
different   matter.    These   arguments,   and   others   less
vivacious, but not less cogent, from Mr. Scrutton, were,
together with those of the opposing counsel, unfolded
at great length, in the Court of Appeal before the Master
of the Rolls, the President of the Probate Division and
Lord  Justice  Romer.    The   Master  of the Rolls,  in
giving judgment, said that Lord Rosebery had no copy-
right in his speeches, although he could have obtained it
if he had liked.    There was no evidence that he trans-
ferred  his   right  to   acquire   copyright  to   The   Times.
Mr. Justice North took the view that although a reporter
had no copyright in the speech or address which he
reported, he had a copyright in his verbatim report of
the speech or address.    The Master of the Rolls could
not take that view.    The reporter was not the author of
the speech, therefore the Act gave him no right to copy-
right in that speech.    The reporter was not the author
of the matter reported, and to hold that every reporter
of a speech had copyright in his own report would be to
stretch the language of the Act of 1842 to an extent
which it would not bear.    The Act was only intended to
protect authors, not reporters, and although it might
be that reporters ought to be protected, it by no means
followed that Parliament could place reporters and their
employers in the same position as authors.    He therefore
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