new information was introduced in the case, and he ruled against the owners of the ship. In doing this, he achieved his aim of preventing maritime insurance law from becoming more complicated. Copyright law Mansfield made another notable judgment in , in relation to copyright law. Andrew Millar was a bookseller who in 1729 had purchased the publishing rights to James Thomson's poem "The Seasons". After the term of the exclusive rights granted under the Statute of Anne expired, Robert Taylor began publishing his own competing publication, which contained Thomson's poem. Mansfield, sitting with three other judges, concluded that despite the Statute of Anne there was a perpetual common law copyright, and therefore that no works can ever be considered public domain. This was a massive victory for booksellers and publishers, as it meant that they could effectively make it impossible for new companies to compete, as in the absence of new texts, there was nothing they could print. Mansfield's judgment was finally overruled by the House of Lords in Donaldson v Beckett in 1774. Mansfield's judgment has been criticised as being unusually short-sighted because he failed to see that while his decision was correct for that particular case, the precedent it would set would create an unfair monopoly for the booksellers and publishers. This was one of only a small number of cases in which Mansfield was overruled; in his entire career only six of his judgments were overturned by a higher court. Mansfield's judgement here has been seen as part of a wider agenda; along with other legal figures such as Sir William Blackstone, he was personally in favour of a perpetual copyright. Junius In 1695 Parliament failed to renew the Licensing Acts, and as a result, the press were free to print material attacking the government. Although there were eight attempts to force a new Licensing Act through Parliament between 1697 and 1713, none of them succeeded. Despite the freedom of the press from pre-censorship by the government, the judiciary regularly tried people for seditious libel if they printed material attacking the government. From 21 November 1768, letters written by a man under the pseudonym of Junius were published in the Public Advertiser, a London newspaper run by Henry Sampson Woodfall. In them, Junius attacked many political leaders, including Lord Granby and Mansfield. As his letters were wildly popular, the circulation of the Public Advertiser doubled in