Moyse on Colonialism and Canadian Copyright Law

Pierre-Emmanuel Moyse, McGill University, Faculty of Law, has posted Colonial Copyright Redux: 1709 vs. 1832:

The study of colonialism shows us that the law often serves the needs and interests of both the Imperial power and the subjugated country. Concessions are necessary to rule a conquered population. In order to understand Canadian law and the measure of Imperial influence, one must understand the dialogue between the various legal traditions.

This essay will examine legal transplants in a historical and colonial context. It will begin with a brief review of Canadian history in order to understand the evolution of Canadian copyright law. It will focus on the creation and significance of Canada’s first copyright legislation. Using the Statute of Anne as a reference point, this essay will describe the evolution of Canadian copyright law on its journey to self-determination during the 18th and 19th centuries. More specifically, this essay will explore the influence of the 1709 Statute of Anne on the 1832 colonial Acte pour protéger la propriété intellectuelle.

It will argue that the influence of the Statute of Anne as an expression of the Canadianess of Canadian copyright policy is not to be found in the text of 1832. It can be found in the small prints of the numerous bills and amendments proposed to the English Parliament, in those provisions buried in the text which triggered an open war between Canadian, American and English publishers and stigmatized by the 1847 Foreign Reprints Act. It is in the context of the 1847 piece that the influence of the Statue of Anne and its monopolistic or imperialistic effects can be fully grasped

Reilly on Our 19th-Century Patent System

Greg Reilly, IIT Chicago-Kent College of Law, has posted Our 19th Century Patent System, from IP Theory 7:2( 2018):

One’s view of the patent system depends on what perspective is taken. A narrow focus on the operational level of doctrinal implementation of patent law reveals significant instability and fluctuation in the patent system. A broader focus on the foundational and systemic characteristics of the patent system reveals such substantial stability for so long that the American patent system reasonably can be described as a 19th century patent system. And an even broader focus on the entire history of the American patent system reveals that this stability was only achieved after a period of significant change, diversity, and experimentation in the first few decades of the patent system. The result is a patent system disconnected in significant ways from the modern legal system but one that could be justified on the basis of stability, resilience, and the assumed wisdom of long-standing practice. At the same time, however, mistaking this long-standing practice and potential policy desirability for necessary, inherent, or mandatory features overlooks the instability, change, and diversity in the early decades of the American patent system.

Goold on the Lost Tort of Moral Rights Invasion

Patrick Russell Goold, Qualcomm Fellow at the Harvard Law School, has posted The Lost Tort of Moral Rights Invasion, which is forthcoming in the Akron Law Review:

Moral rights are often portrayed as an unwelcome import into U.S. law. During the nineteenth century, European lawmakers, influenced by personality theories of authorship, began granting authors rights of attribution and integrity. However, while these rights proliferated in Europe and international copyright treaties, they were not adopted in the United States. According to a common historical narrative, U.S. courts and lawmakers resisted moral rights because they were deemed incompatible with the copyright tradition of treating expressive works as alienable property. What little moral rights U.S. law provides today is thus seen as a necessary evil, grudgingly accepted, simply to comply with international obligations.

This Article presents a history of moral rights protection that challenges, to a degree, that common historical narrative. The Article tracks how American courts adjudicated attribution and integrity disputes during the twentieth century. Doing so not only reveals that the American judiciary was more sympathetic to these claims than commonly appreciated, but, even more surprisingly, came close to developing a tort of moral rights invasion. While copyright historians know that courts have long provided proxy protection for moral rights under preexisting common law causes of action (e.g., defamation, unfair competition, privacy, etc.), what is not widely known is how frequently courts were willing to protect attribution and integrity interests directly under the banner of moral rights. This Article tells the story of how courts in the mid-twentieth century, applying state law, increasingly articulated a "sui generis tort" of moral rights invasion. It then proceeds to question why the moral rights tort stagnated and was forgotten about in the late twentieth century.

Weekend Roundup

• Over at JOTWELL's Property section, Shelley Ross Saxer (Pepperdine Law) has posted an admiring review of University of Virginia legal historian Maureen Brady's forthcoming article on "Damagings Clauses."

• Also in JOTWELL, from the Intellectual Property section, Mark McKenna (University of Notre Dame) praises "The Article of Manufacture in 1877," by Sarah Burstein (University of Oklahoma).  The article appeared in Volume 32 of the Berkeley Technology Law Journal (2017).

• Martha S. Jones, Johns Hopkins University, will deliver the keynote speaker at the Spring 2018 Commencement Ceremonies at the University of Michigan-Flint. 

• “So you want to synthesize filmmaking with legal history? Davidson has a course for that": John Wertheimer’s "Filming Southern Legal History" seminar.  More.

• Starting on April 16, Laney College in Oakland, CA, will host Herstory: The Legal History of Chinese American Women.  Drawn from the personal collection of Dr. Chiu Chang, the exhibit “features rare photographs and case descriptions of efforts by Chinese-American women to gain legal standing in the U.S.”

• ICYMI, last week the California Law Review hosted a symposium on Amanda Tyler's Habeas Corpus in Wartime (Oxford University Press).  

• Timothy Snyder's revelatory essay on Ivan Ilyin and his influence on Putin's Russia.  Chilling reading, after reports of Stephen Bannon's advice to the White House on executive privilege.

• From Krista Kesselring at the Legal History Miscellany blog: "Star Chamber Stories: Using Criminal Law to Criminal Ends in Early Modern London."

•  Our friends at the Max Plank Institute for European Legal History have announced Legal Journals of the 19th Century (Juristische Zeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts).  It provides “online access to a vast collection of legal journals . . .   Seventy-five journals were selected, compiled in uninterrupted series, supplemented with structural and meta-data, and published.”  More.

• At the Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy blog: a recent online roundtable discussion of Ornit Shani's book, How India Became Democratic (announced on the blog here), featuring essays by Suhrith Parthasarathy, Anupama Roy, and blog host Gautam Bhatia, along with a response from the author.

• Today is the early registration deadline for the 2018 Policy History Conference. 

Weekend Roundup is a weekly feature compiled by all the Legal History bloggers.

Boyden on the Melodramatic Origins of a Copyright Landmark

Bruce E. Boyden, Marquette University Law School, has posted Daly v. Palmer, or the Melodramatic Origins of the Ordinary Observer, which appears in Syracuse Law Review 68 (2018): 147-179:

Scene from Daly's Under the Gaslight (NYPL)

Daly v. Palmer, decided in 1868, began as one zealous New York theater owner’s attempt to prevent his rivals from capitalizing on his greatest dramatic success—the famous “Railroad Scene,” in which a character is tied to railroad tracks by the villain and is rescued only seconds before an approaching train passes. But the decision, authored by future Supreme Court Justice Samuel Blatchford, proved to be a landmark in copyright law for almost seventy years. Daly was one of the first plaintiffs to claim infringement by nonverbatim copying from an artistic, not informational, work, and his case anticipated by several decades an explosion of such lawsuits at the turn of the century. As those difficult cases became legion, courts and treatise writers alike looked to Blatchford’s detailed analysis for guidance.

Daly was innovative in two ways. Judge Blatchford extended copyright protection for plays beyond the printed text of the script, and held that the value of a work included the intangible impression made by the work on its audience when performed. Second, he measured infringement of such works by comparing the similarities in their sequence of events, even where no dialog was copied. Twentieth-century courts widely adopted Blatchford’s “sequence of events” test to determine if the narrative of one work infringed another. But eventually judges became dissatisfied with such piecemeal analysis, and, searching for an alternative, found Daly’s other holding: that the overall impression made upon the audience might matter.

This article, part of the “Forgotten IP Cases” Symposium hosted by the Syracuse Law Review, traces the origins and subsequent career of what was for many decades one of the most widely cited infringement cases in copyright law. It explores why Daly was so influential, and how it was ultimately replaced by the Second Circuit’s decision in Arnstein v. Porter. The concluding section offers some thoughts on what causes a copyright opinion to gain or lose precedential value.

O'Melinn on the Common-Law Origins of Copyright

Liam O'Melinn, Ohio Northern University, has posted The Ghost of Millar v. Taylor: The Mythical Common Law Origins of Copyright and the Copyright Servitude:

The Ghost of Common Law Copyright walks abroad once more, relishing the prospect of “the next great copyright act” and tempting us to inquire anew whether the origins of copyright are to be found in the common law. Despite being answered time and again in the negative, this question preys upon modern sensibilities predisposed to the view that artists who painted on the walls of ancient caves had a primordial right to prevent “pirates” from copying their works. The belief that the common law has always provided creators with a right against unauthorized reproduction is quietly but increasingly influential, and it has helped to propel copyright law toward limitless expansion. According to the common-law view, most famously expressed in Millar v. Taylor in England in 1769, this right antedates any positive enactments made on its behalf, and the earliest copyright statutes simply secured or augmented rights already in existence. Millar was overruled in Donaldson v. Becket in 1774, but its spirit has lingered on, haunting the legal landscape of copyright. This theory has served as the basis of an increasing tendency toward the retrospective creation of property in nearly any “subject matter” -- as this copyright theory describes cultural exchange -- that is perceived to be of potential value. The common law view has made its influence felt in a distension of culture, a distortion of the law, and a tendency to create a boundless form of property. This property without bounds, in turn, is justified by the recursive insertion of an author or creator whose original right provides the ostensible basis of current title.

In American law this approach has rested on three propositions: That authors in England always had a right to prevent unauthorized publication of their writings, that Americans carried this right with them from England to their new colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and that as between the two landmark decisions in English copyright law, Millar v. Taylor and Donaldson v. Beckett, Americans chose the view taken in Millar that copyright was a perpetual right originating in the common law. This final claim is ostensibly bolstered by the belief that Americans knew the result in Millar but not in Donaldson, and that when they began to pass their own copyright statutes they were passing the familiar common law result into law. This article focuses on these claims, arguing that there was no common law copyright before the passage of the Statute of Anne, and no norm prohibiting unauthorized publication. It would be closer to the mark to say that unauthorized publication was the norm, and that our timeless right of first publication is actually a much more modern and statutory creature than we have imagined. Americans had no common law inheritance to carry with them to the colonies, and they actually did know the result in Donaldson shortly after it was decided, leaving no reason to believe that American copyright law followed the Millar decision.

The article concludes with a consideration of the modern implications of the success of the myth of common law copyright. These include a distortion of culture to make it fit the contours of copyright law, the increased dedication of the law to the protection of a species of property that knows no bounds, and the imposition what I term the “copyright servitude,” which protects the interests of copyright holders by limiting the uses that can be made even of lawfully-purchased products, and by impeding the development of alternative means of transmission of information.

Alexander on the Origins of Obscenity Exceptionalism

James R. Alexander, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, has posted Chasing Echoes of Obscenity Exceptionalism in Copyright: Recent Swarm Cases, which is forthcoming in volume 17 of the Chicago-Kent Journal of Intellectual Property (2018):

Recent district court rulings regarding copyright violations using BitTorrent file-sharing protocols to illegally download pornographic films have been numerous and largely procedural. But some have casually included language challenging the established doctrine of content neutrality in copyright, noting that obscenity exceptionalism might still be within the court’s policy discretion. This article traces these recent rulings and finds little substantive argument on behalf of exceptionalism other than its long-time understanding under common law, now abandoned. It also examines the critical early nineteenth century common law rulings considered seminal in establishing content exceptionalism in copyright and finds that current court references to them in swarm cases appear willing to accept what was believed to be their governing principles without consideration of the cautions expressed by earlier courts.

The article draws upon Professor Alexander’s considerable research on Lord Eldon’s opinion in Walcot v. Walker (Ch. 1802).

Swanson on the Corset

Kara Swanson, Northeastern University School of Law has posted on SSRN "The Corset," her forthcoming contribution to A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects, edited by Dan Hunter and Claudy Op Den Camp and coming out with Cambridge University Press. Here is the abstract: 

Corset Sylphide (1899) (NYPL)

Two centuries ago, women and girls throughout the United States reached for one piece of technology first thing in the morning, and kept it with them all day long -- the corset. Although earlier men had worn corsets, the corset’s purpose by the mid-nineteenth century was to create the public shape of the female body. It emphasized (or depending on the whims of fashion, deemphasized), bust, waist, and hips in ways intended to accentuate differences between male and female. Today, the corset still fascinates, an emblem of femininity that appears on fashion runways, the concert stage (famously worn by pop star Madonna), and in blockbuster movies (Rocky Horror Picture Show, Gone with the Wind). Less visible are the ways the corset as an object of intellectual property has exposed the masculine assumptions in our understanding of technology, patents, and law.

For more on corsets, don't miss Ruth Goodman's How to Be a Victorian: A Dawn-to-dusk Guide to Victorian Life and anything on Frida Kahlo's painted corsets.

H/t: The Faculty Lounge (on the book)

Willinsky on intellectual property & learning

Out soon with the University of Chicago Press by John Willinsky, Stanford University is The Intellectual Properties of Learning: A Prehistory from Saint Jerome to John Locke. From the publisher: 

Providing a sweeping millennium-plus history of the learned book in the West, John Willinsky puts current debates over intellectual property into context, asking what it is about learning that helped to create the concept even as it gave the products of knowledge a different legal and economic standing than other sorts of property.

Willinsky begins with Saint Jerome in the fifth century, then traces the evolution of reading, writing, and editing practices in monasteries, schools, universities, and among independent scholars through the medieval period and into the Renaissance. He delves into the influx of Islamic learning and the rediscovery of classical texts, the dissolution of the monasteries, and the founding of the Bodleian Library before finally arriving at John Locke, whose influential lobbying helped bring about the first copyright law, the Statute of Anne of 1710. Willinsky’s bravura tour through this history shows that learning gave rise to our idea of intellectual property while remaining distinct from, if not wholly uncompromised by, the commercial economy that this concept inspired, making it clear that today’s push for marketable intellectual property threatens the very nature of the quest for learning on which it rests.

Further information is available here.

Madison on the Football as an IP Object

Michael J. Madison, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, has posted The Football as Intellectual Property Object, which is forthcoming in A History of Intellectual Property in 50 Objects, edited by Dan Hunter and Claudy Op Den Kamp (Cambridge University Press).

Soccer Match, 1928 (NYPL)

The histories of technology and culture are filled with innovations that emerged and took root by being shared widely, only to be succeeded by eras of growth framed by intellectual property. The Internet is a modern example. The football, also known as the pelota, ballon, bola, balón, and soccer ball, is another, older, and broader one. The football lies at the core of football. Intersections between the football and intellectual property law are relatively few in number, but the football supplies a focal object through which the great themes of intellectual property have shaped the game: origins; innovation and standardization; and relationships among law and rules, on the one hand, and the organization of society, culture, and the economy, on the other.

Beauchamp on Repealing Patents

Christopher Beauchamp, Brooklyn Law School, has posted Repealing Patents:

The first known patent case in the United States courts did not enforce a patent. Instead, it sought to repeal one. The practice of cancelling granted patent rights has appeared in various forms over the past two and a quarter centuries, from the earliest U.S. patent law in 1790 to the new regime of inter partes review (“IPR”) and post grant review. With the Supreme Court’s grant of cert in Oil States Energy Services v. Greene’s Energy Group and its pending review of the constitutionality of IPR, this history has taken on a new significance.

This essay uses new archival sources to uncover the history of patent cancellation during the first half-century of American patent law. These sources suggest that the early statutory provisions for repealing patents were more widely used and more broadly construed than has hitherto been realized. They also show that some U.S. courts in the early Republic repealed patents in a summary process without a jury, until the Supreme Court halted the practice. Each of these findings has implications—though not straightforward answers—for the questions currently before the Supreme Court.

Patent lawyers have already found the paper and appreciated the insight it provides into a question to be argued before the US Supreme Court, whether “AIA-trials – trial-like administrative patent revocations–are Constitutionally proper.”

Eliason on the Blues Contracts of Trumpet Records

Antonia Eliason, University of Mississippi School of Law, has posted Lillian McMurry and the Blues Contracts of Trumpet Records, which is forthcoming in the Mississippi Law Journal:

Trumpet Records was a Jackson, Mississippi-based record label established and run by Lillian McMurry from 1950 until it folded in 1955. This article draws on archival material to evaluate the progression of the contracts entered into by Trumpet Records with its blues artists, arguing that this demonstrates the evolving contractual understanding of a young record label, showing increasing sophistication and an awareness of some of the potential pitfalls of signing artists. The contracts of Trumpet Records, when taken together with the correspondence of the label’s head with her artists, also show a commitment to fairness and a level of scrupulousness and honesty not often seen in the industry. The article also examines the legal dispute between Sherman Johnson and Trumpet Records, which reached the Mississippi Supreme Court. The article further turns to the subsequent copyright infringement of a number of Trumpet Record recordings by European record labels in the 1970s, which sheds light on the widespread practice of piracy prevalent in relation to older blues recordings.

Landmark Cases in Intellectual Property Law

New from Hart Publishing: Landmark Cases in Intellectual Property Law, edited by Jose Bellido, Senior Lecturer in Law at Kent Law School, University of Kent.:

This volume explores the nature of intellectual property law by looking at particular disputes. All the cases gathered here aim to show the versatile and unstable character of a discipline still searching for landmarks. Each contribution offers an opportunity to raise questions about the narratives that have shaped the discipline throughout its short but profound history. The volume begins by revisiting patent litigation to consider the impact of the Statute of Monopolies (1624). It continues looking at different controversies to describe how the existence of an author's right in literary property was a plausible basis for legal argument, even though no statute expressly mentioned authors' rights before the Statute of Anne (1710). The collection also explores different moments of historical significance for intellectual property law: the first trade mark injunctions; the difficulties the law faced when protecting maps; and the origins of originality in copyright law. Similarly, it considers the different ways of interpreting patent claims in the late nineteenth and twentieth century; the impact of seminal cases on passing off and the law of confidentiality; and more generally, the construction of intellectual property law and its branches in their interaction with new technologies and marketing developments. It is essential reading for anyone interested in the development of intellectual property law.

Mention you saw it on Legal History Blog for a 20 percent discount!  Table of Contents after the jump.

Bond on an Austrian Interned in Australia in WW1

Catherine Bond, University of New South Wales, has posted 'Through the Dreadful Circumstances of Fate, a Broken Man’: Anton Reznicek, War and Australian Law, 1911-1930, which is to appear in Legal History 17 (2017): 46:

This article examines the life of Anton Reznicek, an Austrian man who came to Australia to test a patented diving suit and was forced to remain in the country as a result of the outbreak of World War I. It traces Reznicek’s arrival, internment and deportation, and the 11-year campaign of correspondence he undertook seeking to receive either the restoration of, or remuneration under, his Australian patent rights. Reznicek’s story is unique on account of the fact that, through his choices, he managed to interact with, or be affected by, a majority of the most significant laws enacted in Australia during the war. This article pieces together a story scattered across archival records, newspaper articles and personal documents, providing an important case study into the individual legal experience in World War I Australia.

Brauneis on the Supreme Court's Deadlock on Fair Use, 1958 & 1974

Robert Brauneis, George Washington University Law School, has posted Parodies, Photocopies, Recusals, and Alternate Copyright Histories: The Two Deadlocked Supreme Court Fair Use Cases:

Before any of the Supreme Court’s trio of fair use decisions – Sony v. Universal City Studios, Harper & Row v. Nation, and Campbell v. Acuff-Rose – there were the 1958 case of CBS v. Loew’s and the 1974 case of Williams & Wilkins v. United States: two copyright infringement suits that had turned on fair use in the lower courts, and that the Supreme Court had decided to review and had heard argument in. In both of those cases, however, one of the Justices recused himself, and the others deadlocked 4-4, leading to summary affirmance of the lower court judgments. How would the Court have decided those cases without the recusals? How would the decisions have affected the development of copyright and fair use doctrine? And were the recusals justified?

The papers of a number of Justices, combined with other historical materials, provide surprisingly good answers to those questions. In CBS v. Loew’s, a case in which the Ninth Circuit had held that a Jack Benny parody of the movie Gaslight infringed copyright in that work, the Supreme Court voted to reverse. Justice Douglas started to draft an opinion for the Court, only to recuse himself to pursue a business opportunity with CBS that never materialized. In Williams & Wilkins, a case in which the Court of Claims had held the photocopying practices of two government libraries to fall within the scope of fair use, the Court would also most likely have reversed, with Justice Blackmun providing the fifth vote to decide that the practices were infringing. However, Blackmun recused himself because the Mayo Clinic, whose employment he had left fifteen years previously, took the position that the photocopying was fair use, and was one of thirteen parties signing on to one of many amicus briefs in the court below. Justice Douglas’s recusal, I argue, was unjustified, and Justice Blackmun’s dubious at best.

In a world in Douglas and Blackmun had not recused themselves and the Court had decided CBS and Williams & Wilkins, how could copyright law look different than it now does? I explore that question at three different moments in time. First, I argue that immediately after a CBS v. Loew’s decision in 1958, there might not have been a fair use doctrine separate from a general inquiry into copyright infringement. Second, I contend that just after a Williams & Wilkins decision in 1974, fair use doctrine would likely have focused entirely on what have become known as “productive” or “transformative” uses, while excluding “non-productive” uses and eschewing any distinction between commercial and noncommercial uses. Finally, I consider the present moment, and consider the possible continuing impact of hypothetical decisions in CBS and Williams & Wilkins. Ultimately, however, my goal is not to prove exactly how CBS or Williams & Wilkins would have come out, or would have diverted the path of fair use doctrine or copyright infringement analysis. Rather, I am interested in using the materials that are available about those cases, and the realization that the Supreme Court came very close to deciding them, to free up my imagination, and yours, about how copyright law and the fair use doctrine could be different than they are.

Brennan on Compulsory Licensing of IP

David J. Brennan, Swinburne Law School, has posted The First Compulsory Licensing of Patents and Copyright, which is forthcoming in Legal History 17 (2017): 1-45:

This article explains how compulsory licensing for intellectual property originated in British law in the 19th Century and the early part of the 20th Century for both patents and copyright. It is a history that is intricate, straddling the two regimes that comprise the main pillars of intellectual property, and requires consideration of contemporaneous developments occurring in the USA, North American colonies and Continental Europe. Through its exposition and analysis of the first five distinct compulsory licensing regimes, some concluding observations are made about the triggers for the first compulsory licences and the conditions that might help predict the desirability of compulsory licensing as a matter of modern public policy in any given setting.

Swanson Reviews Three Patent Histories

Kara W. Swanson, Northeastern University School of Law, has posted "Great Men," Law, and the Social Construction of Technology, a review essay forthcoming in Law and Social Inquiry:

Alexander Graham Bell is famous as the inventor of the telephone. Is his fame owing to law and lawyers? Two recent histories argue that some popular tales of invention originated with lawyers and judges as part of patent litigation battles. (Stathis Arapostathis and Graeme Gooday, Patently Contestable: Electrical Technologies and Inventor Identities on Trial in Britain (2013); Christopher Beauchamp, Invented by Law: Alexander Graham Bell and the Patent that Changed America (2015)). Bringing law into the historical project of understanding the social construction of technology, the authors unsettle great man narratives of invention. A tale of a recent patent war, however, is a case study in the persistence of such narratives, highlighting the uses of legal storytelling. (Ronald K. Fierstein, A Triumph of Genius: Edwin Land, Polaroid, and the Kodak Patent War (2015)). Together, these works invite consideration of the cultural power possessed by invention origin stories, the role of narratives in law and history, and the judicial performance of truth-finding in Anglo-American law.

Alexander on a Landmark Copyright Decision in Georgian England

James R. Alexander, University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, has posted Libel and Copyright in the Satire of Peter Pindar:

In 1802, the English Chancery Court denied the satirical poet John Wolcot (‘Peter Pindar’) injunctive relief for copyright infringement claimed against his publisher John Walker. While the original agreement between the parties was ambiguous, the ruling was more procedural rather than interpretive. As Wolcot’s verse was always scandalous and arguably libelous, Eldon ruled that Wolcot should first establish his property in the contested works at law before seeking equitable relief, to thereby clear away any question of their criminality. This was arguably the first application to copyright of an eighteenth-century maxim that there could be no property in criminally-libelous literary works. Almost immediately and for over the next century in equity cases and both English and American legal treatises, Eldon’s ruling was interpreted as establishing the Court as censor morum, authorized under common law to rule exceptions to copyright protection based on a determination of illicit or illegal content, regardless of whether copyright statutes specified content-based exceptions. However, a careful review of the Chancery records reveals the ruling warrants a more tempered reading, and that the long-assumed legal precedent may have followed a hoped-for rather than established principle.

A Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law

Just out from Edward Elgar is Research Handbook on the History of Copyright Law, edited by Isabella Alexander, University of Technology Sydney, and H. Tomás Gómez-Arostegui, Lewis and Clark Law School:

There has been an explosion of interest in recent years regarding the origin and of intellectual property law. The study of copyright history, in particular, has grown remarkably in the last twenty years, with a flurry of activity in the last ten. This Handbook takes stock of the field of copyright history as it stands today, as well as examining potential developments in the future.

The contributions feature copyright and history experts from across the UK, Australia, the United States, France, Spain and Italy. Covering European, US and international copyright history and traversing from the 16th Century to the early 20th century, this book offers a broad survey of the field and a solid foundation for future research.

Students and scholars of copyright law, authorship, art, and the book and music trades will find this book to be an invaluable resource. It will also be of use to practising lawyers and judges with an interest in the doctrinal history of copyright law.

TOC after the jump:

Pre-1870 Copyright Records at GW's Burns Law Library

[We have the following announcement.]  The Jacob Burns Law Library is pleased to announce a new online collection: "Pre-1870 Copyright Records." The collection provides access to over 2,000 pages of digitized U.S. copyright records created prior to 1870 that had generally been assumed lost. The records were tracked down and digitized by Zvi S. Rosen, currently a Professorial Lecturer in Law and Visiting Scholar at The George Washington University Law School. Rosen received his LLM in Intellectual Property in 2006 from the Law School and later served as the 2015-2016 Abraham L. Kaminstein Scholar in Residence at the U.S. Copyright Office.

According to Rosen, "until mid-1870, copyright registration duties were handled by the local U.S. District Court of the author or proprietor, while the work itself was deposited with the Department of State (until 1846), Library of Congress (1846-1859, 1865-1870), Smithsonian Institution (concurrently 1846-1859), and Patent Office (1859-1865, 1865-1870 concurrently). In 1870, all copyright responsibilities were centralized in the Library of Congress."

Rosen notes that "for New York, Philadelphia, and Boston, whose District Courts together handled 85% of copyright activity before 1870, the Library of Congress has a complete or essentially complete set of the records. However, for many jurisdictions with a comparatively small volume of copyright activity, records may only exist for the years immediately before 1870, if at all."  The fact that so many Federal Court records had apparently gone missing perplexed him, and he set about to discover what had happened.

Rosen says that his "ultimate hope is that the Rare Book Room of the Library of Congress will digitize their holdings of pre-1870 copyright records . . . and, when combined with this project, will represent an essentially complete record of copyright (and thus literary, musical, etc.) activity in America  in its earliest days."

The Pre-1870 Copyright Records collection is available here.