Copyright in America Quiz

PDF page 112: Ever practical, the Founding Fathers sought to construct an intellectual property regime that above all else would encourage the growth of commerce and industry in order to ensure the survival of the young American nation during its precarious beginnings. 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. 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 112: Ever practical, the Founding Fathers sought to construct an intellectual property regime that above all else would encourage the growth of commerce and industry in order to ensure the survival of the young American nation during its precarious beginnings. 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. 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 112: Ever practical, the Founding Fathers sought to construct an intellectual property regime that above all else would encourage the growth of commerce and industry in order to ensure the survival of the young American nation during its precarious beginnings. 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. 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 113: England, but rather to ensure that books with demonstrably practical benefits to society would be available to readers of the new Republic.” This emphasis was certainly in tune with the realities of American book trade. Domestic publishers mainly produced newspapers, almanacs, and practical guides—reading material of useful value to a nation that needed to build an entire economy from scratch. Most important literary works, on the other hand, were imported from Britain and France.

PDF page 113: 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 113: 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 113: 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 113: 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 114: 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. 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 114: 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. 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 114: 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 114: 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.