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The enforcement of the Statute of Anne in April 1710 marked a historic moment in the development of copyright law. As the world's first copyright statute it granted publishers of a book legal protection of 14 years with the commencement of the statute. It also granted 21 years of protection for any book already in print. [19]
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, copyright law assigns a set of exclusive rights to authors: to make and sell copies of their works, to create derivative works, and to perform or display their works publicly. These ...
The major contributions made by lawyers to the history of copyright date from the late 1960s when, within a year of each other, two American scholars, Benjamin Kaplan and Lyman Ray Patterson, published their works. Of these two books Patterson’s offers the most detailed account of the development of copyright. [1]
The 1710 British Statute of Anne did not apply to the American colonies. [3] The colonies' economy was largely agrarian, hence copyright law was not a priority, resulting in only three private copyright acts being passed in America prior to 1783. [4] Two of the acts were limited to seven years, the other was limited to a term of five years. [4]
In 1834, Congress allowed a copyright to be transferred to someone else, a record of which had to be made within 60 days. [ 2 ] In 1846, Congress established the requirement of depositing copies of the work at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian , in addition to the copies already required to be deposited with the Secretary of State .
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Thus, state copyright law governed protection for unpublished works, but published works, whether containing a notice of copyright or not, were governed exclusively by federal law.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 ...