Strahan seems to have been seeking support for a protest against the ruling that literary copyright was not the perpetual possession of the original owner.

Such are the best teachers; a dogma learned is only a new error - the old one was perhaps as good; but a spirit communicated is a perpetual possession.

As the above example makes clear it was a freehold tenure as it was held in perpetual possession, which is equivalent to "hereditable" in secular terms.

One might add willful ignorance or political complacency, as Jonathan Swift did in defining happiness as the "perpetual possession of being well deceived," the "serene, peaceful state of being a fool among knaves."

Murphy is thought to have coined the legal term "wilful misconstruction" whilst representing the Donaldson v. Becket appeal to the House of Lords in 1774 against the perpetual possession of copyright.

When the Church was first received at Frankish courts, it insisted that land made over to it for churches and so forth be conveyed in perpetual possession and the transaction embodied in the type of written deed to which it was accustomed.

Mr. Gould, senior, did not desire the perpetual possession of that desolate locality; in fact, the mere vision of it arising before his mind in the still watches of the night had the power to exasperate him into hours of hot and agitated insomnia.

The court held that when the transfer of software to the purchaser materially resembled a sale (non-recurring price, right to perpetual possession of copy) it was, in fact, a "sale with restrictions on use" giving rise to a right to resell the copy under the first-sale doctrine.

In United States v. Wise, which directly addressed the classification of sales and licenses for the purposes of first sale with respect to film prints, the court found that the crucial factor was whether the transaction gave rise to a right of perpetual possession in the transferee.

However, under United States v. Wise, the transfer of copies of Autodesk's software would be considered sales, because the realities of the transfers imply a right of perpetual possession of the copy, and so Vernor would be protected under the first-sale doctrine.