Authors, Publishers and Politicians: The Quest for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement, 1815-1854 (original) (raw)
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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 as a Property Right? Authorial Perspectives in Eighteenth-Century England
UC Irvine law review, 2018
In recent decades, various scholars have questioned the proposition that copyright must necessarily be rooted entirely in a property paradigm, and have sought to show how, over the last century and a half or so, that paradigm has been applied increasingly strictly and its logic has been extended with ever greater force. In response, others have contended that copyright has always been understood as a property right. An examination of eighteenth-century sources shows that the conception of copyright as a form of property was neither the only, nor even the dominant, paradigm in circulation at the time. Moreover, when studying these sources, we must ask who is using the language of property: judges, members of the bookselling industry and their lawyers, writers and their counsel, or some combination of these? Building on earlier work that traces some aspects of the property framework as it developed in eighteenth-century British jurisprudence, I show how members of the publishing indus...
2010
BRIAN LEE PELANDA* While the Americans stand astonished at their former delusion and enjoy the pleasure of a final separation from their insolvent sovereigns, it becomes their duty to attend to the arts of peace, and particularly to the interests of literature; to see if there be not some errours to be corrected, some defects to be supplied, and some improvements to be introduced into our system of education, as well as into those of civil policy. We find Englishmen practicing upon very erroneous maxims in politics and religion; and possibly we shall find, upon careful examinations, that their methods of education are equally erroneous and defective.
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.
"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).