Isulong SEOPH: A Brief History Of Copyright Law

A Brief History Of Copyright Law   by George Johnson

Authors, patrons, and owners of works throughout the ages have tried to
direct and control how copies of such works could be used once disseminated to
others. Mozart's patron, Baroness von Waldstätten, allowed his compositions
created for her to be freely performed, while Handel's patron jealously guarded
"Water Music."

Two major developments in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries seem to have
provoked the development of modern copyright. First, the expansion of mercantile
trade in major European cities and the appearance of the secular university
helped produce an educated bourgeois class interested in the information of the
day.

This helped spur the emergence of a public sphere, which was increasingly
served by entrepreneurial stationers who produced copies of books on demand.
Second, Gutenberg's development of movable type and the development and spread
of the printing press made mass reproduction of printed works quick and much
cheaper than ever before.

The process of copying a work could be nearly as labor intensive and
expensive as creating the original, and was largely relegated to monastic
scribes before printing. It appears that publishers, rather than authors, were
the first to seek restrictions on the copying of printed works.

Given that publishers commonly now obtain the copyright from the authors as a
condition of mass reproduction of a work, one of the criticisms of the current
system is that it benefits publishers more than it does authors. This is one of
the chief arguments in favor of peer-to-peer file sharing systems, making an
analogy with the changes wrought by printing.

An interesting attempt at copyright in the early modern period was the notice
attached to the ha- Shirim asher li-Shelomo , a setting of the Psalms by the
composer Salomone Rossi, which happened to be the first music to be printed with
a Hebrew type-face text (1623). It included a rabbinical curse on anyone who
copied the contents.

While governments had previously granted monopoly rights to publishers to
sell printed works, the modern concept of limited duration copyright originated
in 1710 with the British Statute of Anne. This statute first accorded exclusive
rights to authors (ie, creators) rather than publishers, and it included
protections for consumers of printed work ensuring that publishers could not
control their use after sale.

It also limited the duration of such exclusive rights to 28 years, after
which all works would pass into the public domain.

There were territorial loopholes in the 1710 Act. It did not extend to all
British territories, but only covered England, Scotland, and Wales.

Many reprints of British copyright works were consequently issued both in
Ireland and in North American colonies, without any license from the copyright
holder required. These works were frequently issued without payment to British
copyright holders, so they were cheaper than London editions.

There was, between 1710-1774, legal debate about what length of time was
meant in the 1710 act.

Publishers in Scotland, in the 1730's, began to reprint titles that they no
longer considered to be protected by copyright. Scottish publishers printed what
they perceived to be public domain English works whose copyright had expired.
They sold these titles in Scotland, and in the English provinces. English
publishers objected to this, on the basis of what they saw as common-law rights
and property (under the concept of common-law rights in the English system),
which predated the Copyright Act. Under common-law rights, rights in published
works were held to continue into perpetuity.

The case of Donaldson vs Beckett, in 1774, brought disagreements on the
length of copyright to an end, and changed common law in this regard. The
outcome of the case resulted in the decision that Parliament could, and had, put
a limit on copyright length.

This decision reflected a shift in English ideas of copyright. The English
lords who made the decision in 1774 decided that it was not in the public's best
interest to have London publishers control books in perpetuity, particularly as
English publishers not uncommonly kept prices higher than otherwise.

Concepts of the roles of the author and publisher, of copyright law, and of
general Enlightenment notions, all interacted in this period of copyright
development. Authors had been previously seen to be divinely inspired in some
sense. Patronage was a legitimate way to support authors, in part because of
this. Authors who were paid, rather than entering into patron-relationships,
were often regarded as hacks, and looked down upon. However, the notion of
individual genius was becoming more common during the 1770's (the generation
after Donaldson v Beckett), and being a paid author therefore became more
accepted.

The Irish also made a flourishing business of shipping reprints to the North
America in the 18th century. Ireland's ability to reprint freely ended in 1801
when Ireland's Parliament merged with Great Britain, and the Irish became
subject to british copyright laws.

The 1886 Berne Convention first established recognition of copyrights among
sovereign nations, rather than merely bilaterally. Under the Berne Convention,
copyrights for creative works do not have to be asserted or declared, as they
are automatically in force at creation: an author need not "register" or "apply
for" a copyright in countries adhereing to the Berne Convention.

The USA did not initially sign the Berne Convention and would not do so until
1989, however many European countries did. The UK signed on in 1887, on behalf
of itself and its colonies, but did not implement large parts of it in British
law until 100 years later, with the introduction of the Copyright, Designs and
Patents Act of 1988.

posted by RB2 @ 6:14:00 PM