Declarations of Cultural Independence: The Nationalistic Imperative Behind the Passage of Early American Copyright Laws, 1783-1787 (original) (raw)
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Authors, Publishers and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 1815-1854
The American Historical Review, 1977
I am to those who facilitated my research into previously unpublished materials on both sides of the Atlantic. In the section of Acknowledg ments I mention these sources by name, but here I should like to express my deep sense of gratitude to those who helped to finance my undertaking. During the past ten years Wabash College has been most generous in supporting my project in its various phases. I am also greatly indebted to grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Philosophical Society, and the Social Science Research Council. May I also take this opportunity to mention a few of the many indi viduals who have sustained me throughout the past decade with advice and encouragement: Mr Simon Nowell-Smith of Oxford; Mr Ronald E.
Copyright and Social Movements in Late Nineteenth-Century America
Theoretical Inquiries in Law, 2011
The cultural turn in copyright law identified authorship as a rhetorical construct employed by economic interests to strengthen claims to property rights. Grassroots intellectual property political movements have been seen as both a means of countering these interests' everexpanding proprietary control of knowledge and establishing a more public regarding copyright system. This Article examines one of the most notable intellectual property political movements, the emergence of late nineteenth-century agitation to provide copyright protection for foreign authors as a social movement. It places this political and legal activism within the larger framework of Progressive Era reform. During this period, activists promoted the idea of the public
The Anglo-American Copyright Law and Nineteenth-Century Commercial Writers
The following essay is a brief historical summary about the evolution of Anglo-American copyright laws from the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century and their impact upon commercial writers. The essay focuses on the most important issues addressed by the first formal copyright protective statutes, emphasizing their similarities and differences and their subsequent development. It also highlights the role and contribution of the most predominant literary figures on the development of international copyright regulations. There is also a discussion of the main economic and social changes that influenced the evolution of copyright laws, and a description of the social and working conditions of commercial Anglo-American writers until the end of the nineteenth century.
"Copyright, Originality, and the Public Domain in Eighteenth Century England"
Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and …
Scholarship on the development of copyright in eighteenth-century England, after the Act of Anne (1710), has suggested that aesthetic debates about originality, in the sense of novelty or creativity, had an effect on contemporaneous legal thinkers' ideas about originality as a prerequisite for copyright protection. But when eighteenth-century commentators such as Blackstone and Hargrave spoke of originality for purposes of copyright, they were referring to a prohibition against reprinting books, not a demand for novelty. Recognizing that full-scale copies were prohibited, while partial copies were permitted, is crucial for an understanding of eighteenth-century literary culture, which had room for abridgements, unauthorized sequels, highly imitative parodies, and anthologies that reprinted some poems and excerpted others. The public domain was not understood as the residue of material that was not eligible for copyright protection; rather, all work was presumptively available for use by other writers unless it fell within the narrow bounds of copyright protection. The chapter begins by showing that arguments in favor of a public domain were implicit in the efforts by Locke and others to eliminate the Licensing Act in the 1690s. The second section discusses the eighteenth-century debate over copyright, emphasizing the limited scope of legal protection and the correspondingly wide reach of the public domain. This section focuses on the case law concerning the permissibility of abridgements, the legal writings of Blackstone and Hargrave, and the aesthetic writings of Richard Hurd and Samuel Johnson. As these sources reveal, literary critics were willing to defend imitative writing, and legal thinkers found little to criticize and much to praise in practices such as abridgement. The third section discusses the kinds of imitations that were allowed to flourish under this legal regime, and shows that imitative practice was crucial for the development of the modern novel in the 1740s. Finally, a short section at the end looks at why writers sometimes call for a strong originality requirement that demands more than Feist (in the U.S.) or C.C.H. (in Canada).
New York University Journal of Intellectual Property and Entertainment Law, 2012
The U.S. Supreme Court in Eldred v. Ashcroft gave First Amendment importance to the topic of copyright history. In measuring whether Congress has altered the “traditional contours” of copyright such that First Amendment scrutiny must be applied, federal courts—including the Supreme Court in its 2011 Term case Golan v. Holder—must carefully examine the intertwined history of copyright and freedom of the press. The famous but misunderstood case of Donaldson v. Beckett in the British House of Lords in 1774 is an important piece of this history. In Donaldson, several lawyers, litigants, judges, and lords recognized the danger posed by copyright to untrammeled public communication. Eighteenth-century newspaper accounts shed new light on the free press implications of this important period in copyright law history.
The Cambridge Law Journal, 1988
In 1886, most national copyright laws were not much more than a few decades old. The United Kingdom was, of course, an exception as it had enacted the first modern copyright statute as far back as 1709 (the "Act of Anne"). The scope of this Act was quite limited, and it was restricted to books, but during the next hundred years protection was extended in piecemeal fashion to other kinds of works, including engravings, sculptures and dramatic works. In most other European countries, however, the situation as regarded the protection of authors was similar to that which had obtained in the United Kingdom prior to 1709: there was no express recognition of authors' rights, and the only protection available was that accorded through the grant of privileges or monopolies for the printing of particular books. These privileges were usually granted by governments to publishers and printers, rather than authors.. .. A similar situation prevailed for longer in most European countries, in particular France, the German and Italian states, and Spain. Even in this country, the members of the Stationers' Company strove long and hard throughout the eighteenth century to retain their traditional privileges with respect to the printing of books. Thus, it was not until the end of that century that it was firmly established that the rights accorded under the Act of Anne were authors' rights, rather than publishers' or printers' rights. In France, on the other hand, completely new ground was broken when the ancien régime was swept away by the Revolution of 1789. The rights of man, now enshrined in the new revolutionary laws, were soon recognized to include the rights of authors in their works. A Law of 1791 therefore accorded an exclusive right of public performance to the authors of dramatic and musical works for a period lasting five years after their deaths. A second Law of 1793 granted, in respect of all works, what we would now call an "exclusive reproduction right," enduring for the life of the author. There was a conscious philosophical basis to these laws that was lacking in the Act of Anne, in that the former conceived of the rights of authors as being rooted in natural law, with the consequence that these laws were simply according formal recognition to rights that were already in existence. In the years following the French Revolution, this new conception of authors' rights spread to other continental European countries, in particular Belgium, the Netherlands and the Italian states. It also influenced the adoption of copyright laws in the various German states after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire brought an end to the system of imperial privileges that had formerly applied in those states. Other European countries followed suit, and by 1886 almost all the European states, including the newly unified states of Italy and Germany, had enacted their own copyright laws. Outside of Europe, the United States had had a copyright law since 1791, and laws on copyright were to be found in seven other states of Latin America. A number of other countries, such as Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, protected authors' rights in a partial or incidental fashion through provisions in their general civil, criminal or press laws. Many of these new laws drew on the models provided by the two French Laws of 1791 and 1793, although it should be noted that French copyright law continued to develop rapidly throughout the nineteenth century and to do so as much through the jurisprudence as through legislative enactments. Nevertheless, while the principal issues addressed by national laws were the same, the solutions adopted were often quite different. Most laws extended protection to a wide range of productions of a literary and artistic character, including works intended for public presentation, such as musical and dramatic works. But some categories of works, such as architectural, oral and choreographic works, were protected only in a few countries, and there were widely differing approaches to the protection of photographic works. Great diversity also existed in relation to the matter of duration of protection. In two Latin American countries, Guatemala and Mexico, this was perpetual, but in all other countries protection was limited in time. This was usually for a period comprising the life of the author together with a fixed period after his death. France had led the way here with a post mortem auctoris term of 50 years, but in 1879 Spain adopted a period of 80 years, and other nations had terms ranging between 5 and 50. A few other
4. The Scope of Artistic Copyright in Nineteenth-Century England
Open Book Publishers, 2021
Modern copyright law abounds in distinctions that were delineated differently, if at all, before the twentieth century-such as distinctions that separate idea from expression, 'fair dealing' from excessive use, and 'verbatim' copies from 'nonliteral' copies that use characters or other distinctive aspects of the work. In 1800, the scope of copyright barely extended beyond direct and complete reproduction of a protected work. Language in various eighteenth-century British statutes and legal cases suggested otherwise, but scholars have yet to find a single instance, before 1800, of a plaintiff who won an infringement case when the defendant had copied less than the entire work. 2 During the first half of the nineteenth century, some plaintiffs prevailed in lawsuits over abridgments, and those decisions, in the area of literary copyright, signaled a conceptual shift that allowed for increasingly broad coverage extending to nonliteral uses. Scholars such as Isabella Alexander, Derek Miller, and Oren Bracha, among others, have discussed the expanding scope of literary copyright in nineteenth-century British and American law. 3 The scope of artistic copyright, in relation to these developments, 1 Thank you to all the participants in the two workshops that led to the publication of this volume, and particularly to Stéphanie Delamaire and Will Slauter.