A Selected History of Copyright
This time line focuses on the history of copyright in terms of legal and social views on purpose, duration, and justification. More general landmarks of publishing, printing, and copyright are included to provide perspective for the ways these views have changed over time.
Early Copyright 1
- 1480 – Lettou becomes first printer in London
- 1484 – international trade restrictions placed on everything except printing (England)
- 1496 – Caxton introduces printing press to England
- 1523/1529 – trade and labor statutes placed on domestic trade including book selling and printing (England)
- 1533 – trade statute of 1484 repealed; 1533 statute forbids imported books (England)
- 1538 – (November 16th) Henry VIII establishes royal licensing system (England)
- 1546 – (July 8th) Henry VIII establishes standard of printing texts w/ clear ref. to author, publisher, date; also requires a copy to be donated to the town (England)
- 1566 – Star Chamber Decree – Censoring act (England)
- 1577 – Stationer’s Copyright (England)
- right to publish a work granted to a printer and member of Stationer’s company
- not a mark of ownership of a text; printers were not authorized to edit, manipulate, or change at text in any way
- copyright, however, could be owned, as it could be sold or passed
- copyright was purely an economic entitlement
- c. 1500’s – Printer’s Patent (England)
- sovereign-assigned right to publish
- most profitable books (schoolbooks, bibles, the ABC) were issued printing patents
- 1586 – Star Chamber Decree – Censoring act (England)
- 1637 – Star Chamber Decree – Censoring act (England)
- 1662 – Licensing Act required censor’s license and stationer’s copyright on all published works (England)
- 1694 – Licensing Act lapses, ending government censorship and stationer’s copyright (England)
- 1709 – Statute of Anne (England)
- “First copyright act without provisions or censorship” but is still related to Star Chamber Decree of 1637 and the Licensing act of 1662
- not about censorship or creativity; “trade-regulation act”
- extended existing copyright for twenty-one year period before forced renewal
- limited all new copyright to fourteen year terms in order to break bookseller’s monopoly on copyright
- allowed anyone to hold copyright; only author could renew
- author merely a pawn to break up monopoly; rights weren’t offered as a reward for creation
- 1709-1774 – “Battle of the Booksellers” (England)
- Stationers file legislation with Parliament–fails
- Stationers file litigation
- Stationers uphold copyright doesn’t include ownership of work; author assigns copyright “ownership” to stationer when he agreed to have it published
- common-law courts interpreted initial ownership to exist with author
- stationers almost won, until Donaldson
- 1769 – Millar V. Taylor (England)
- recognizes copyright as a natural right
- Court of King’s Bench, Lord Mansfield of author’s common-law, perpetual copyright based on natural rights: “It is just.”
- 1774 – Donaldson v. Beckett (England)
- House of Lords overturns Millar
- recognizes author’s right to content as natural until he recognizes statutory copyright through publishing; then remits full rights and accepts lawful limitations
- monopoly of booksellers finally breaks down
Copyright Law in the U.S. and Abroad 2
- 1787 – U.S. Constitution ratified, stating “the Congress shall have power … to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.” (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Clause 8)
- 1790 – First Federal copyright: Copyright Act of 1790
- grants authors rights to “print, re-print, or publish their work for a period of fourteen years and to renew for another fourteen”.
- 1831 – Copyright Act Revised (1st revision)
- grants authorial rights for twenty-eight years with a fourteen-year renewal option.
- 1834 – Wheaton v. Peters
- A Supreme Court Case upholds the utilitarian interpretation of the Copyright Act
- 1853 – Stowe v. Thomas
- The Third Court of Appeals rules that a translated work does not infringe on the original work’s copyright
- Judge also holds that an author’s ideas and sentiments can no longer be exclusively held
- 1870 – Copyright Act Revised (2nd revision)
- No major changes to copyright length
- 1886 – Berne Convention
- 1891 – International Copyright Act
- The first U.S. law that recognized copyrights of foreign authors
- 1908 – The Berlin Act (Berne Convention)
- set term of copyright to life of author plus fifty years
- 1909 – Copyright Act Revised (3rd revision)
- redefined “authorship” to include works like music
- set copyright terms at twenty-eight years with a twenty-eight-year renewal
- 1928 – The Rome Act
- moral rights of authors recognized as law
- “the right to object to modifications or to the destruction of a work in a way that might prejudice or decrease the artists’ reputations”
- moral rights of authors recognized as law
- 1976 – Copyright Act Revised (4th revision)
- brings U.S. closer to international regulations set forth by Berne convention
- extends copyright term to fifty years after author’s death
- accounts for technological advances
- defines fair use
- brings U.S. closer to international regulations set forth by Berne convention
- 1988 – U.S. joins Berne Convention
- U.S. acknowledges international copyright laws and agrees to keep its own no less strict than the convention sets
- 1991 – Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Co., Inc.
- defines facts as uncopyrightable and investigates transformation and authorship. (see also: “Feist Publications Inc. v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc.“
- 1992: Copyright Act Amendment to Section 304 of Title 17
- prevents works from passing into public domain with automatic renewal, beginning the modern trend of a continually shrinking public domain
- 1993 – Playboy Enterprises Inc. vs. Frena
- The court’s decision sets precedence for future lawsuits when it determines that knowledge of copyright legislation and
- 1993 – Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights established
- commissions the Secretary of Commerce and representatives of several Federal agencies to investigate the state and development of the copyright legislation
- will issue “The Green Paper” in 1994 and “The White Paper” in 1995, beginning the legislative journey to the development of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998
- 1994 – The Green Paper
- The Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights issues a call for input and publishes a draft of their findings
- 1995 – The White Paper
- The Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights publishes their findings and recommendations for further amendments to the Copyright Act of 1976 through the NII Copyright Protection Act
- 1996 – World Intellectual Property Organization forms
- creates two treaties dedicated to “the need to maintain a balance between the rights of authors and the larger public interest, particularly education, research and access to information.” (WIPO Treaty)
- 1998 – Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act
- extends copyright terms from the authors life plus fifty years to the author’s life plus seventy years, crippling the further growth of public domain
- 1998 – Digital Millennium Copyright Act
- most famously prohibits gaining unauthorized access to a work by circumventing a technological protection measure put in place by the copyright owner where such protection measure otherwise effectively controls access to a copyrighted work” (DMCA; see also Digital Millennium Copyright Act)
- also establishes WIPO treaties as U.S. law, limits liability of ISPs, permits copying of computer software for maintenance purposes
- 1999 – Uniform Computer Information Transaction Act approved by National Conference of Commissioners on Uniform State Laws
- codifies the ways software providers and consumers interact, including standardizing licensing agreements, terms of fair use, and return policies. The UCITA has only been passed in Virginia (March 2000) and Maryland (April 2000) as it is considered detrimental to consumers’ rights and overly protective of software providers’ profits
- UCITA essentially seeks “to replace the public law of copyright with the private law of contracts”
- 1999 – Digital Theft Deterrence and Copyright Damages Improvement Act of 1999
- increases minimum and maximum monetary damages for copyright infringement and digital theft
- 2000 – Librarian of Congress exempts three classes of content from DMCA Section 1201(a)(1)
- “compilations of lists of Web sites blocked by filtering software applications; and literary works, including computer programs and databases, protected by access control mechanisms that fail to permit access because of malfunction, damage, or obsolescence” are exempt from protection by the DMCA’s anti-circumvention statute.
- information provided by the American Library Association, the American Association of Law Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, the Medical Library Association, and the Special Libraries Association is also exempt in order to preserve fair use for the associations’ users
- the Librarian also recommends a strong review of the DMCA: “In particular, he noted the ‘potential damage to scholarship’ and possible harm to ‘American creativity’ resulting from provisions in the statute”
- see also: “Rulemaking on Exemptions from Prohibition on Circumvention of Technological Measures that Control Access to Copyrighted Works”
- 2001 – New York Times vs. Tasini
- Supreme Court upholds a ruling forcing the New York Times to address the republication of freelance authors’ work online; sets a precedent for establishing electronic republication rights in freelance contracts
- 2001 – Dmitri Sklyarov arrested for Copyright Circumvention
- after cracking the Adobe eBook DRM system, Skylarov and the company for which he worked were prosecuted for circumventing the DRM and for trafficking digital content
- the cases against Sklyarov and Elcomsoft may have failed (charges against Sklyarov were dropped and Elcomsoft was acquitted), but the incident begin a wave of “crackdowns” against individual digital media copyright infringers
- 2002 – Consumer Broadband and Digital Television Promotion Act (S. 2048) proposed
- this bill–intended to regulate DRM for any digital product through interstate commerce regulation–never made it out of the Senate
- 2003 – Eric Eldred v. John Ashcroft, a challenge to 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act
- contests the constitutionality of the retroactive extension of copyright for works created before 1976, and would have theoretically opened the public domain markedly if the challenge hadn’t been denied
- 2004 – Chamberlain Group Inc. v. Skylink Techs. Inc.
- the mechanical garage door manufacturer sued the universal garage door opener manufacturer for “circumventing” the code required to engage the door mechanism
- the Federal court ruled that the circumvention method created by Skylink allowed consumers to further use the product they’d purchased from Chamberlain, negating any copyright infringement with the inherent rights of fair use
- (also, according the the EFF: “This is a mind-bogglingly absurd case involving circumvention.”)
- 2005 – Google Book Search Library Project
- seeks to digitize holdings from world libraries and allow internal searching of all texts while only allowing works in the public domain
- considered the scion of fair use and a detriment to copyright holders
- two lawsuits are filed including Authors’ Guild vs. Google and Association of American Publishers vs. Google
- (see also: “Google Book Search Legal Analysis“
- 2006 – H.R. 5439 (“Orphan Works Act of 2006″) Proposed
- though this orphan works legislation–designed to allow good-faith use of works whose copyright owners cannot be contacted for permission–didn’t pass, work has continued through several phases including “Shawn Bentley Orphan Works Act of 2008″ (S. 2913) and “Orphan Works Act of 2008″ (H.R. 5889) with the continued support of the U.S. Copyright Office
- (see also: Report on Orphan Works)
- 2008 – The Google Settlement
Copyright Law, Technology, and the New Millennium
Conclusions and Position
Trends in copyright legislation and litigation over the past five centuries has certainly flowed with our social concepts of authorship and property. The motivation behind the most modern amendments, however, should neither be seen as entirely benign efforts of authors to retain control of the quality of their work nor as a means to protect the financial investment that encourages authors to continue creating. Book publishers and sellers are no longer the only other contestants concerned with the state of copyright: educational institutions, libraries and archives, the music industry, software companies, and a variety of businesses have jumped into the late-twentieth-century fray that set current copyright precedents. Copyright today is not the original institution its first authors intended, much in the same way that the ideas of any political party are altered across decades and centuries. What matters most is that copyright continually satisfies the needs of content creators, providers, and consumers. This project, in part, will investigate the ways in which current laws may or may not be able to work with the concepts we maintain in business practices.
Footnotes:
1. Patterson, Lyman Ray. Copyright in Historical Perspective. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 1968. Back to reference.
2. Association of Research Libraries. “Copyright Timeline: A History of Copyright in the United States.” Association of Research Libraries. 12 Dec. 2007. 9 July 2009 <http://www.arl.org/pp/ppcopyright/copyresources/copytimeline.shtml>. Note that some quotations in this section have been individually cited and linked directly to the source; quotes without immediate attribution are from the “Copyright Timeline.” Back to reference.
