Suchergebnisse

This study of author's reversion rights begins with the Statute of Anne and the debates that led up to the adoption of section 11, which vested in the author a second fourteen-year term, provided he or she was still alive at the end of the initial fourteen-year term. The study then will address the impact of the author's reversion right on publishing practice and authors' welfare in the United Kingdom through the eighteenth century to the demise of the reversion right in 1814. We will suggest that the apparent lack of use of the reversion right by authors in the eighteenth century was a result of a host of factors, including but not limited to the common (but by no means universal) contractual practice which purported to confer on a publisher the entirety of an author's rights. In addition, we call attention to the multiple and shifting interpretations of what was required by section 11, as well as the social and economic limitations on an author's capacity to take advantage of the reversion. The second half of this study turns to the law and publishing practices in the United States, where reversion rights have proved more enduring if not always more beneficial to authors. The study concludes that history and practice suggest at best inconsistent achievement of reversonary rights' aim to offset the author's weaker bargaining position by assuring her a future opportunity to make a better deal. Legislators might improve the reversion rights regime, but it is not clear that authors' lots will accordingly ameliorate. Substantive regulation of contracts of transfer, rather than rights to terminate those transfers, may offer the preferable path to ensuring meaningful and effective protection of authors' interests in reaping the fruits of their intellectual labors.

"What can and can't be copied is a matter of law, but also of aesthetics, culture, and economics. The act of copying, and the creation and transaction of rights relating to it, evokes fundamental notions of communication and censorship, of authorship and ownership--of privilege and property. This volume conceives a new history of copyright law as fifteen leading academics discuss the changing state of intellectual property across time and between countries"--Publisher's description

Intro -- Privilege and Property -- Contents -- Contributors -- Introduction. -- 1. From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent -- 2. 'A Mongrel of Early Modern Copyright': Scotland in European Perspective -- 3. The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright: Areopagitica, the Stationers' Company, and the Statute of Anne -- 4. Early American Printing Privileges. The Ambivalent Origins of Authors' Copyright in America -- 5. Author and Work in the French Print Privileges System: Some Milestones -- 6. A Venetian Experiment on Perpetual Copyright -- 7. Les formalités sont mortes, vive les formalités! Copyright Formalities and the Reasons for their Decline in Nineteenth Century Europe -- 8. The Berlin Publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the Reprinting Sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794 -- 9. Nineteenth Century Controversies Relating to the Protection of Artistic Property in France -- 10. Maps, Views and Ornament: Visualising Property in Art and Law. The Case of Pre-modern France -- 11. Breaking the Mould? The Radical Nature of the Fine Arts Copyright Bill 1862 -- 12. 'Neither Bolt nor Chain, Iron Safe nor Private Watchman, Can Prevent the Theft of Words': The Birth of the Performing Right in Britain -- 13. The Return of the Commons - Copyright History as a Common Source -- 14. The Significance of Copyright History for Publishing History and Historians -- 15. Metaphors of Intellectual Property -- Bibliography -- Index.