Social authorship ventures involving masses of volunteers like Wikipedia are thought to be a phenomenon enabled by digital technology, presenting new challenges for copyright law. By contrast, the case study explored in this article uncovers copyright issues considered in relation to a 19th-century social authorship precedent: the 70-year process of compiling the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (NED) instigated by the not-for-profit Philological Society in 1858, which involved thousands of casually organized volunteer readers and subeditors. Drawing on extensive original archival research, the article uses the case study as a means of critically reflecting on the claims of existing interdisciplinary literature concerning copyright and ‘authorship’; unlike the claims of the so-called Romanticism thesis, the article argues that copyright law supported an understanding of NED authorship as collaborative and democratic. Further, in uncovering the practical solutions, which lawyers considered in debating issues relating to title and rights clearance, the article uses the 19th-century experience as a vantage point for considering how these issues are approached today; despite the very different context, the copyright problems and solutions debated in the 19th century demonstrate remarkable continuity with those considered in relation to social authorship projects today.