ABSTRACT
From the time of the first federal copyright law in 1790 until enactment of the International Copyright Act in 1891, US copyright law did not apply to works by authors who were not citizens or residents of the United States. US publishers took advantage of this lacuna in the law, and the demand among American readers for books by popular British authors, by reprinting the books of these authors without their authorization and without paying a negotiated royalty to them. This Article tells the story of how proponents of extending copyright protections to foreign authors – called international copyright – finally succeeded after more than fifty years of failed efforts. Beginning in the 1830s, the principal opponents of international copyright were US book publishers, who were unwilling to support a change in the law that would require them to pay negotiated copyright royalties to British authors and, even worse from their perspective, would open up the American market to competition from British publishers …
Rothchild, John A, How the United States Stopped Being a Pirate Nation and Learned to Love International Copyright (March 10, 2019). 39 Pace Law Review 361 (2018); Wayne State University Law School Research Paper No 2019-55.
First posted 2019-04-20 06:17:08
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