because the copyright term granted by statute had expired or because they were first published before the Statute of Anne was enacted in 1710. This opened the market for cheap reprints of works by Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer, works now considered classics. The expansion of the public domain in books broke the dominance of the London booksellers and allowed for competition, with the number of London booksellers and publishers rising nearly threefold, from 111 to 308, between 1772 and 1802. Eventually an understanding was established whereby authors had a pre-existing common law copyright over their work, but that with the Statute of Anne parliament had limited these rights in order to strike a more appropriate balance between the interests of the author and the wider social good. According to Patterson and Livingston, confusion about the nature of copyright has remained ever since. Copyright has come to be viewed both as a natural-law right of the author and as the statutory grant of a limited monopoly. One theory holds that copyright is created simply by the creation of a work, the other that it is owed to a copyright statute. In August 1906 The Copyright Law for Music Act 1906, known as the T.P. O'Connor Bill was added to copyright law when it was passed by the British Parliament, following many of the popular music writers at the time dying in poverty due to extensive piracy by gangs during the piracy crisis of sheet music in the early 20th century. The gangs would buy a copy of the music at full price, copy it, and resell it, often at half the price from the original. Early French copyright law In pre-revolutionary France all books needed to be approved by official censors and authors and publishers had to obtain a royal privilege before a book could be published. Royal privileges were exclusive and usually granted for six years, with the possibility of renewal. Over time it was established that the owner of a royal privilege has the sole right to obtain a renewal indefinitely. In 1761 the Royal Council awarded a royal privilege to the heirs of an author rather than the author's publisher, sparking a national debate on the nature of literary property similar to that taking place in Britain during the battle of the booksellers. In 1777 a series of royal decrees reformed the royal privileges. The duration of privileges