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The copyright law of the United States grants monopoly protection for "original works of authorship". [1] [2] With the stated purpose to promote art and culture ...
Prior to the passage of the United States Constitution, several states passed their own copyright laws between 1783 and 1787, the first being Connecticut. [6] Contemporary scholars and patriots such as Noah Webster, John Trumbull, and Joel Barlow were instrumental in securing the passage of these statutes. [6]
Today national copyright laws have been standardised to some extent through international and regional agreements such as the Berne Convention and the European copyright directives. Although there are consistencies among nations' copyright laws, each jurisdiction has separate and distinct laws and regulations about copyright.
A copyright cannot be granted to a non-citizen whose country has not been acknowledged as in a reciprocal copyright arrangement with the United States by a formal presidential proclamation. Because the non-citizen is not granted a copyright, they cannot assign a copyright for a work to a citizen of a country with American copyright privileges.
While the U.S. became a party to the UCC in 1955, Congress passed Public Law 743 in order to modify copyright law to conform to the Convention's standards. [6] In the years following the United States' adoption of the UCC, Congress commissioned multiple studies on a general revision of copyright law, culminating in a published report in 1961. [7]
Thus, state copyright law governed protection for unpublished works, but published works, whether containing a notice of copyright or not, were governed exclusively by federal law. If no notice of copyright was affixed to a work and the work was "published" in a legal sense, the 1909 Act provided no copyright protection and the work became part ...
The first sentences of the two laws are almost identical. Both require registration in order for a work to receive copyright protection; similarly, both require that copies of the work be deposited in officially designated repositories such as the Library of Congress in the United States, and the Oxford and Cambridge universities in the United ...
In 1856, copyright was expanded to the right to restrict public performance of a work. [2] In 1859, the requirement of depositing copies of the work at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian was repealed. [2] In 1861, copyright cases were allowed to be heard by the United States Supreme Court, regardless of the amount of money at stake. [2]