Another failure, identified by Bracha, is not found in what the Statute covered, but in what it did not. The Statute did not provide any means for identifying authors, did not identify what constituted authored works, and covered only "books", even while discussing "property" as a whole. Moreover, the right provided was merely that of "making and selling ... exact reprints. To a large extent, the new regime was the old stationer's privilege, except it was universalised, capped in time, and formally conferred upon authors rather than publishers". The effect of the Statute on authors was also minimal. Previously, publishers would have bought the original manuscript from writers for a lump sum; with the passage of the Statute, they simply did the same thing, but with the manuscript's copyright as well. The remaining economic power of the Company also allowed them to pressure booksellers and distributors into continuing their past arrangements, meaning that even theoretically "public domain" works were, in practise, still treated as copyrighted.
