Copyright in America Quiz

PDF page 109: After the Constitutional Convention and the establishment of Congress, the first federal copyright statute was signed into law by President George Washington on May 31, 1790, less than two months after the first patent law was approved.

PDF page 109: The law stipulated that “the author and authors of any map, chart, book or books already printed within these United States, being a citizen or citizens thereof, shall have the sole right and liberty of printing, reprinting, publishing and vending such map, chart, book or books” for a period of 14 years, with the right of renewal for another 14 years. The Founders’ belief that 28 years was the proper maximum copyright term stands in sharp contrast to today’s controversial maximum copyright term of life-plus-70 years, an issue we will discuss later in this chapter.

PDF page 108: But in copyright law, a different approach was taken—one that acknowledged authors’ rights but placed far greater emphasis on the public’s need for widespread access to learning and on the growth of markets. James Gilreath, the Library of Congress historian who in the late nineteenth century painstakingly reconstructed Thomas Jefferson’s massive library catalog burned by the British in 1814, explained the Founders’ view this way: “The constitutional copyright provisions’ emphasis on the useful arts sought not to bolster a professional literary establishment of novelists, poets, and critics such as the one that existed in

PDF page 110: Another sign that the emphasis of U.S. copyright law was to facilitate the diffusion of knowledge over the protection of authors’ inherent property rights was provided by this sentence:

PDF page 110: The first American to receive a U.S. copyright, one month after the Copyright Act was signed into law, was John Barry for his spelling book. The first woman granted a copyright was Mrs. Mercy Warren of Massachusetts for her Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous.

PDF page 110: The first American to receive a U.S. copyright, one month after the Copyright Act was signed into law, was John Barry for his spelling book. The first woman granted a copyright was Mrs. Mercy Warren of Massachusetts for her Poems, Dramatic and Miscellaneous.

PDF page 110: In other words, America’s first copyright law explicitly authorized the piracy of foreign cultural works in order to promote widespread citizen access to the benefits of learning. And that’s exactly what Americans did, unabashedly pirating European culture and resisting for a century all attempts to alter what Europeans called its “obnoxious laws.”

PDF page 110: Public Domain) Still, the law’s focus on the public interest was clear in the first five words of the text: “An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by securing the Copies of Maps, Charts and Books, to the Authors and Proprietors of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned.” The failure in the text to distinguish between “authors” and “proprietors” (i.e., publishers, printers, and booksellers), of course, also suggested that Congress did not view copyright as an innate or moral right of authors. In fact, copyright was conditional upon the author or proprietor depositing a copy of the work in the district court and paying a fee of 60 cents.

PDF page 109: Anyone violating a copyright “shall forfeit all and every copy and all and every sheet to the author or proprietor who shall forthwith destroy the same.” What’s more, “offenders shall also forfeit and pay the sum of fifty cents for every sheet which shall be found in his or her possession.” As a final disincentive to infringers, the law allowed copyright owners to file suit “in any court of record in the United States within one year after the cause of action.”

PDF page 109: “Whereas it is perfectly agreeable to the principles of natural equity and justice, that every author should be secured in receiving the profits that may arise from the sale of his works, and such security may encourage men of learning and genius to publish their writings; which may do honor to their vii country, and service to mankind." But it also made it quite clear that copyrighted books had to be offered at reasonable prices or the state would issue a compulsory license enabling anyone to copy these at will. No one failed to get the point.

PDF page 108: For patent law, this meant creating the maximum possible incentives to those whose ingenuity would spur the development of agriculture and domestic industry. As economist Jonathan Hughes once noted, entrepreneurinventors like Eli Whitney, who developed a cotton gin in 1793 that increased agricultural production a hundredfold, were“the vital few” upon whom the nation depended for progress. That’s why early Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story argued that patent rights were “sacred,” and the just reward for their contributions to society.

PDF page 112: Between 1790 and 1875, more than a hundred petitions were submitted to Congress to bring the United States in line with international copyright laws. All were defeated by publishers’ and printers’ lobbies. It wasn’t until 1891 that the Chace Act granted copyright protection to select foreign authors—but only if their work was published in the United States on or before the publication date in their own countries, and only if the actual printing was done here. The United States failed to qualify for admission to the Berne Convention on copyright until 1988, an astonishing 102 years after the convention.

PDF page 112: Between 1790 and 1875, more than a hundred petitions were submitted to Congress to bring the United States in line with international copyright laws. All were defeated by publishers’ and printers’ lobbies. It wasn’t until 1891 that the Chace Act granted copyright protection to select foreign authors—but only if their work was published in the United States on or before the publication date in their own countries, and only if the actual printing was done here. The United States failed to qualify for admission to the Berne Convention on copyright until 1988, an astonishing 102 years after the convention.