Jan 1704 - Jun 1792

Essay on the Regulation of the Press by Daniel Defoe

Daniel Defoe: "or every Author being oblig'd to set his Name to the Book he writes, has, by this Law, an undoubted exclusive Right to the Property of it. The Clause in the Law is a Patent to the Author, and settles the Propriety of the Work wholly in himself, or in such to whom he shall assign it; and 'tis reasonable it should be so: For if an Author has not the right of a Book, after he has made it, and the benefit be not his own, and the Law will not protect him in that Benefit, 'twould be very hard the Law should pretend to punish him for it."

January 1710

Statute of Anne

Named after the ruling Queen of Great Britain, it would become the basis for British and U.S. copyright law.

December 1769

Joshua Reynolds quoted

Joshua Reynolds: "Invention, strictly speaking, is little more than a new combination of those images which have been previoulsy gathered and deposited in the memory: nothing can come of nothing."

January 1785

On the Unlawfulness of Reprinting by Kant

Kant: " In a book as a written work the author is speaking to his reader; and he who has printed it speaks by his copies not for himself but entirely in the name of the author. He gives public representation to the latter's speaking and facilitates merely the delivery of this speech to the public."

January 1786

Voltaire quoted

Voltaire: "originality is nothing but judicious imitation. The most original writers borrowed one from another. The instruction we find in books is like fire. We fetch it from our neighbors, kindle it at home, communicate it to others, and it becomes the property of all"

January 1787

U.S. Constitution Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8

"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."

January 1790

Benjamin Franklin quoted

Benjamin Franklin: "Originality is the art of concealing your sources"

January 1790

1st US Copyright Law

An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by Securing the Copies of Maps, Charts, and Books to the Authors and Proprietors of Such Copies, was modeled on the Statute of Anne (1710)

January 1790

George Washington to Congress

George Washington: "[T]here is nothing which can better deserve your patronage than the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge is, in every country, the surest basis of public happiness. In one in which the measures of government receive their impression so immediately from the sense of the community as in ours, it is proportionably essential." Washington, G. to Congress on January 8, 1790

January 1813

Thomas Jefferson Selected Writings

Thomas Jefferson: “He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation.”

January 1831

First General Revision of Copyright Law

The first general revision to copyright law adds protection for musical compositions and extends protection to 28 years with an optional 14 year renewal.

January 1834

Balzac's Letter to Authors, Paris

Balzac: If in this world there is one property that is sacred, if there is one thing that can belong to man, then is it not that which man creates between heaven and earth, that which has no other roots than in his intelligence and which flourishes in all hearts?

January 1834

Wheaton V. Peters

Justice McLean: "That an author, at common law, has a property in his manuscript, and may obtain redress against any one who deprives him of it, or by improperly obtaining a copy endeavours to realise a profit by its publication cannot be doubted; but this is a very different right from that which asserts a perpetual and exclusive property in the future publication of the work, after the author shall have published it to the world."

April 1841

Stowe v. Thomas

A case decided by Justice Robert Grier. The case involved a claim of copyright infringement by Harriet Beecher Stowe against a publisher of an unauthorized German translation of her book 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'. The court decided that a translation was not a copy of the original and therefore did not infringe copyright. The decision epitomized the traditional approach that conceptualized copyright protection in terms of the limited right to print copies. From this approach followed a narrow understanding of the scope of copyright protection and of the entitlements it included. When Stowe v. Thomas was decided, this traditional approach was in decline.

April 1841

Folsom v. Marsh

Justice Joseph Story: "It is certainly not necessary, to constitute an invasion of copyright, that the whole of a work should be copied, or even a large portion of it, in form or in substance. If so much is taken, that the value of the original is sensibly diminished, or the labors of the original author are substantially to an injurious extent appropriated by another,that is sufficient, in point of law, to constitute a piracy pro tanto"

January 1842

Dickens at dinner in Boston

Dickens: on international copyright: "There must be an international arrangement in this respect; England has done her part; and I am confident that the time is not far distant when America will do hers. It becomes the character of a great country: first, because it is justice; secondly, because without it you never can have, and keep, a literature of your own."

June 1842

Petition of certain Legal Voters of Boston and its Vicinity...

"It is not … for the prosperity of the writers that we care; --though even this, as to a writer who has pleased and profited us, would be no unworthy feeling; - but we do care for the character of our native country. We do care, that, - while it has advanced far enough in civilization to protect much meaner, and (if we were disposed to split casuistical hairs) more questionable property, - the fabrics of the mind, made out of what was altogether the maker's own, and has in no part abridged the property of any other living being, should be without any legal safegaurd."

February 1844

New York Daily Tribune

"Another great objection against the passage of a Copyright law is, it would enhance the price of books. To say nothing of the unsoundness of the statement. Mr. Campbell would doubtless be horrified at the idea of a foreign nation, for the sake of cheapness, stealing out and out a ship-load of paper he might chance to own, but wonders how a reasonable man can object to stealing all that makes paper valuable, the printed matter on it."

January 1849

Discours de M. Victor Hugo président du Congrès

Victor Hugo: The owner writer is the free writer. To deprive him of property is to deprive him of independence. Victor Hugo: The book as a book belongs to the author, but as thought it belongs - the word is not too vast - to the human race. All intelligences are eligible. If one of the two rights, the right of the writer and the right of the human mind, were to be sacrificed, it would certainly be the right of the writer, because the public interest is our sole preoccupation, and all, I declare, must pass before us.

March 1854

National Intelligencer

"Experience has proved that the most eligible way in which the author can gather the recompense that he deserves it to invest him with the exclusive copyright in his productions for a term of years"

May 1854

National Intelligencer

"If now it can be shown that the author, by virtue of his prductions, becomes not only a laborer for the public good, but also a perpetual property-holder in the fruits of his toil, we should only have to admit that fresh strength and superadded force had been brought to fortify our conclusions; while if those who support the author's claim to be prtected in his rights, and yet refuse to found it on any other ground than the sacred idea of property, shall prove unable to maintain their position, it would seem to leave the author at the mercy of his pluderers through the injudicious conduct of his defenders themselves. ...the author [is] a laborer for the public benefit and is entitled to a full and fair remunderation from every public that so far recognises the value of his services as to avail itself of them..."

Jan 1861 - Aug 1865

Civil War

April 1863

Publication is the Auction by Emily Dickinson

#788

April 1865

Photographs protected by Copyright law

October 1866

Evening Telegraph

Interesting paper by Anthony Trollope on International Copyright, Read at the English Social Science Congress. "The justice of copyright … has been allowed by almost general consent, and it has, as regards the requirements of our own country, been settled by law. I have alluded to it simply that I may call upon you to note that the questions of domestic copyright and of international copyright stand precisely on the same basis. If the one be desireable, the other must be equally desireable, if the one be just, the other must be equally just."

April 1867

International Copyright by Dion Boucicault

Dion Boucicault: "An international copyright is an appeal, not from England, but from that small community, English authors, to the American people to grant a right whereby we shall enjoy a much more valuable market in America than American authors can enjoy by exchange in England. Let us strip the question of the disguise in which it has been exhibited."

May 1869

Daily Evening Telegraph

"The demand for a law to protect intellectual property on both sides of the Atlantic is increasing in volume day by day"

April 1870

Second Revision of Copyright Law

Centralizing copyright activities in the Library of Congress, extending protection to works of art, and giving authors exclusive rights over derivatives

July 1875

National Republican

Charles Reade: "To call an author's property a monopoly is to make the conscience of the pirate easy, and even just men apathetic when an author is swindled; it is to prejudice both judges and juries and prepare the way to false verdicts and disloyal judgments. I pledge myself to prove it is one of the stupidest falsehoods that muddle-heads ever uttered and able, but unguarded men, ever repeated."

April 1879

Unconcious Plagiarism speech by Mark Twain

Mark Twain: "I know one thing--that a certain amount of pride always goes along with a teaspoonful of brains, and that this pride protects a man from deliberately stealing other people's ideas"

April 1880

Ralph Waldo Emerson quoted

Ralph Waldo Emerson: "All my best thoughts were stolen by the ancients"

November 1880

True Northerner

"Give to an author a copyright law by which the fruits of his labors, than which none are ore arduous, equally with the inventor of more material wares, may be enjoyed by himself. Moreover, let not the law stop with securing to invetntors and authors the control of their labors for ten or a dozen years, but let it be for their life and descent to their children and children's children through all posterity."

April 1881

Speech in Montreal by Mark Twain

Mark Twain: "I did not come to Canada to commit crime - this time - but to prevent it. I came here to place myself under the protection of the Canadian law and secure a copyright. I have complied with the requirements of the law; I have followed the instructions of some of the best legal minds in the city, including my own, and so my errand is accomplished, at least so far as any exertions of mine can aid that accomplishment. "

January 1882

Thomas Nast 'Innocence Abroad' in Harper's Weekly

INNOCENCE ABROAD (IN SEARCH OF A COPYRIGHT) Thomas Nast's illustration in Harper's Weekly January 21, 1882, p. 37. From the Dave Thomson collection.

November 1884

International Copyright: Open Letter to the Members by Roger Sherman

"When Congress granted to the American author the exclusive right to his literary production for a period of years, it was for the purpose of stimulating a national literature. If you accord to foreign authors the same right in this country that native writers possess, you tax the American citizen for something that he now possesses free, and you deprive the American artisan of the labor which he would be called to perform in the production of these books, as a higher the price the more limited sales."

January 1885

Weekly Expositor

Rev. Dr. Henry J. Van Dyke, Jr.: "The refusal of our nation to recognize the right of a foreign author to his work is not, as some think, a question of political economy, but one of right and wrong. The unauthorized and uncompensated republication of books amounts to a violation of the moral law. The right of a man to the results of his own toil is one of the first principles of equity, and to this fact a nation should always direct its mind"

April 1885

Mr. Whister's Ten O'Clock by Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde: “An artist”, Wilde commented, “is not an isolated fact; he is the resultant of a certain milieu and a certain entourage”

January 1886

Keppler illustrates 'The Pirate Publisher'

Keppler, J.F. (1886) The Pirate Publisher - An International Burlesque that has the Longest Run on Record. Illustration in Puck 18(468)

January 1886

Puck Magazine "Roger Sherman"

"Oh there is a merry wight,| Roger Sherman is his name, |International copyright | He regards as a howling shame… "

March 1886

Berne Convention

The BERNE Convention was the first multilateral international copyright treaty, signed in Switzerland. The U.S. does not sign.

July 1887

On the Significance of Art by Leo Tolstoy

Leo Tolstoy: "The service of the people by science and art will only be performed when people, dwelling in the midst of the common folk, and, like the common folk, putting forward no demands, claiming no rights, shall offer to the common folk their scientific and artistic services; the acceptance or rejection of which shall depend wholly on the will of the common folk."

December 1887

Letter to the Executive Committee of the American Copyright League

Henrry James: "Our denial of copyright to the stranger has been, it is said, in the interest of universal reading. But our universal reading has done us little good, if it has not taught us that it is better to be strong than to be coddled - and coddled in the least invigorating of all ways, at other people's expense."

March 1888

American Authors and British Pirates by Samuel Clemens

"Today the American author can go to Canada, spend three days there, and come home with an English and Canadian copyright … If he does not make this trip and do this thing, it is a confession that he does not think his foreign market valuable enough to justify the expense ...Now it may turn out that that book is presently pirated in London. ...the pirate has paid that man a compliment; he has thought more of the book than the man thought of it himself..."

September 1888

Frederick Douglas in What American Authors Think About Internaional Copyright

Fred'k Douglass: "Whatever by mind or by muscle, by thought or by labor, a man may have produced, whether it shall be useful or ornamental, instructive or amusing, whether book, plow, or picture, the said producer has in it a right of property superior to that of any other person at home or abroad."

October 1888

Lyman Abbot in What American Authors Think About International Copyright

lyman Abbot: "The demand for International copyright is based, primarily, on principles of simple justice. The right of an author to the product of his brain, like the right of the mechanic to the product of his hands, does not depend upon national or geographical conditions."

October 1888

Henry Longfellow in What American Authors Think About International Copyright

Henry W. Longfellow: "whatever is just for the benefit of all; and I wish we could have a law providing, between England and America, that 'a copyright taken out in either country shall be equally valid in both;" from a letter (Oct 8, 1878)"

March 1889

Common-Sense and Copyrights

"The people, as a whole, may have a large interest in the question, but with the exception of authors and publishers, the individual interests are too slight and too remote to create and crystallize a public sentiment. The authors and the publishers, supported by a large body of influential citizens, are active in aid of the policy."

July 1889

Curse Against Copyright Pirates aka Yokohama Curse by Rudyard Kipling

Rudyard Kipling: "Because you steal the property of a man's head, which is more his peculiar property than his pipe, his horse or his wife, and because you glory in your theft and have the indecency to praise or criticise the author from whom you steal, and because your ignorance, which is as dense as a pickpocket's ignorance of anything outside his calling, leads you to trifle with his spelling, and because you print the stolen property aforesaid very vilely and uncleanly, you shall be cursed with this curse from Alaska to Florida and back again."

April 1890

Letter to Robert Burdette from Mark Twain

Mark Twain: "If a man takes that from me (knowingly, purposely) he is a thief. If he takes it unconsciously--snaking it out of some old secluded corner of his memory, and mistaking it for a new birth instead of a mummy -- he is no thief, and no man has a case against him. "

June 1890

A Plea for Copyright by Count Emile De Keraty

Count Emile De Keratry: "It is impossible to understand on the other side of the ocean how the United States can persist in a system which is unfortunate for the probity of the country, as well as for the development of its literature. It is evident that as long as counterfeiting French works...is authorized, national genius in this country can only develop with the utmost difficulty, owing to the evident fact that American publishers naturally hesitate to pay native authors large amounts when they are able to obtain the works of foreign authors for nothing"