Sidestepping Copyright: British Fairy Tale Anthologies of the 19th Century

One question is how in the golden period of fairy tale anthologising the work of the anthologists escaped the complete influence of copyright law with its paradigm of the individually authored work. The answer, it is suggested, lies, in part, in the early anthologists who formed a folklore society, saw themselves as anthropologists of folk culture, and treated copyright as largely irrelevant for the sake of their perception of the common good, and, in part, in the structure of copyright law itself which does not mandate but simply permits proprietary rights to be asserted.