Copyright, Translations, and Relations between Britain and India in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

This paper examines the tension between trade and development, and its handling in multiple layers of law-making through an historical case study concerning copyright in India in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The paper explains the emergence of views in the Government of India of what copyright law should cover that reflected longstanding but not unproblematic assumptions about India\u27s need for European knowledge and learning. The belief that India needed access to European knowledge informed resistance to the desires of British publishers that copyright owners should be able to control the making of translations of their works. These divergences between what are broadly described as British and Indian views as to the desirability of translation rights emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century in a complex legal environment in which international copyright arrangements were added to those of imperial and local Indian copyright. After two cases in which the Bombay High Court denied the existence of a translation right (under both Indian and the imperial Copyright Act), the British government and the Government of India came under pressure from publishers to adopt such a right. The paper describes how the Government of India resisted such attempts and the deference the British Government was willing to offer it. However, specifically Indian desires were neglected when Britain negotiated copyright matters on the international stage. Instead, Britain committed itself to an increasingly full translation right in the various revisions of Berne Convention, and following the 1908 Revision, sought to legislate a new Imperial Code that reflected these commitments. While India complied with British wishes, and introduced the imperial copyright regime, it utilized the residual powers granted to it to modify and limit the duration of the translation rights. However, the limited application of the modified translation right to works published in India meant that it was an unsuitable means for facilitating the acquisition of European knowledge. Rather, the modifications must be understood symbolically as a proclamation of autonomy, and instrumentally, as a mechanism for the production of an Indian national culture. The case study of the translation right in India highlights the critical importance of social, economic, and cultural context to the operation of copyright and simultaneously resonates with contemporary discussions as to how to accommodate local difference in the context of globalized norms

Copyright, Translations, and Relations between Britain and India in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

This paper examines the tension between trade and development, and its handling in multiple layers of law-making through an historical case study concerning copyright in India in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The paper explains the emergence of views in the Government of India of what copyright law should cover that reflected longstanding but not unproblematic assumptions about India\u27s need for European knowledge and learning. The belief that India needed access to European knowledge informed resistance to the desires of British publishers that copyright owners should be able to control the making of translations of their works. These divergences between what are broadly described as British and Indian views as to the desirability of translation rights emerged towards the end of the nineteenth century in a complex legal environment in which international copyright arrangements were added to those of imperial and local Indian copyright. After two cases in which the Bombay High Court denied the existence of a translation right (under both Indian and the imperial Copyright Act), the British government and the Government of India came under pressure from publishers to adopt such a right. The paper describes how the Government of India resisted such attempts and the deference the British Government was willing to offer it. However, specifically Indian desires were neglected when Britain negotiated copyright matters on the international stage. Instead, Britain committed itself to an increasingly full translation right in the various revisions of Berne Convention, and following the 1908 Revision, sought to legislate a new Imperial Code that reflected these commitments. While India complied with British wishes, and introduced the imperial copyright regime, it utilized the residual powers granted to it to modify and limit the duration of the translation rights. However, the limited application of the modified translation right to works published in India meant that it was an unsuitable means for facilitating the acquisition of European knowledge. Rather, the modifications must be understood symbolically as a proclamation of autonomy, and instrumentally, as a mechanism for the production of an Indian national culture. The case study of the translation right in India highlights the critical importance of social, economic, and cultural context to the operation of copyright and simultaneously resonates with contemporary discussions as to how to accommodate local difference in the context of globalized norms

Privilege and Property. Essays on the History of Copyright

Copyright law is the site of significant contemporary controversy. In recent years copyright history has transformed as a subject from being one of interest to a few books historians to the focus of sustained historical investigation attracting the attention of scholars from across the humanities. This book comprises a collection of essays on copyright history by leading experts drawn from a range of countries and disciplinary perspectives. Covering the period from 1450 to 1900, these essays engage with a number of related themes. The first considers the general movement, from the sixteenth century onwards, from privilege to property-based conceptions of copyright protection. The second addresses the relationship between the protection provided for literary and print materials and that provided for other forms of cultural production. The third concerns the significance and relevance of these various histories in shaping and informing contemporary policy and academic practice. Essays include: 0. The History of Copyright History, by Kretschmer, Deazley & Bently; 1. From Gunpowder to Print: The Common Origins of Copyright and Patent, by Joanna Kostylo; 2. A Mongrel of early modern copyright: Scotland in European Persepctive, by Alastair Mann; 3. The Public Sphere and the Emergence of Copyright: Areopagitica, the Stationers’ Company, and the Statute of Anne, by Mark Rose; 4. Early American Printing Privileges: the Ambivalent Origins of Authors’ Copyright in America, by Oren Bracha; 5. Author and Work in the French Print Privileges System: Some Milestones, by Laurent Pfister; 6. A Venetian Experiment on Perpetual Copyright, by Maurizio Borghi; 7. Les formalités son mortes, vive les formalities! Copyright formalities in nineteenth century Europe, by Stef van Gompel; 8. The Berlin Publisher Friedrich Nicolai and the reprinting sections of the Prussian Statute Book of 1794, by Friedemann Kawohl; 9. Nineteenth Century Controversies relating to the protection of Artistic Property in France, by Frédéric Rideau; 10. Maps, Views and Ornament. Visualising Property in Art and Law: The Case of pre-modern France, by Katie Scott; 11. Breaking the Mould? The Radical Nature of the Fine Art Copyright Bill 1862, by Ronan Deazley; 12. ‘Neither bolt nor chain, iron safe nor private watchman, can prevent the theft of words’: The birth of the performing right in Britain, by Isabella Alexander; 13. The Return of the Commons: Copyright History as a Common Source, by Karl-Nikolaus Peifer; 14. The Significance of Copyright History for the Publishing History and Historians, by John Feather; 15. Metaphors of Intellectual Property, by William St Clair. The volume is a companion to the digital archive Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), funded by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC): www.copyrighthistory.or

The Sole Right ... Shall Return to the Authors : Anglo-American Authors\u27 Reversion Rights from the Statute of Anne to Contemporary U.S. Copyright

The rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a professional class of writers stimulated authors\u27 demands for better remuneration from their writings. The increase in authors who sought to live from their work, rather than from patronage or personal fortune, likely provided at least one impulse for the author-protective provisions of the 1710 Statute of Anne. Under the regime of printing privileges that preceded the Statute of Anne, authors generally received from publisher-booksellers a one-time payment, made when the authors surrendered their manuscripts for publication. Authors whose works enjoyed particularly high demand might negotiate additional payments for new editions or for new printings of a work that had done well, or they might extract a higher price per sheet for their next work, but neither law nor custom generally assured authors remuneration reflective of their works\u27 sales. As a result, few authors participated in the continued success of their works

The Sole Right ... Shall Return to the Authors : Anglo-American Authors\u27 Reversion Rights from the Statute of Anne to Contemporary U.S. Copyright

The rise in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries of a professional class of writers stimulated authors\u27 demands for better remuneration from their writings. The increase in authors who sought to live from their work, rather than from patronage or personal fortune, likely provided at least one impulse for the author-protective provisions of the 1710 Statute of Anne. Under the regime of printing privileges that preceded the Statute of Anne, authors generally received from publisher-booksellers a one-time payment, made when the authors surrendered their manuscripts for publication. Authors whose works enjoyed particularly high demand might negotiate additional payments for new editions or for new printings of a work that had done well, or they might extract a higher price per sheet for their next work, but neither law nor custom generally assured authors remuneration reflective of their works\u27 sales. As a result, few authors participated in the continued success of their works

Primary Sources on Copyright revisited: a copyright history webinar on Papal Privileges and the Stationers' Register

This working paper presents an edited transcript of a copyright history webinar held on 15 December 2021, marking 15 years since the conception of the Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900) 1 digital archive. Giles Bergel (University of Oxford) and Ian Gadd (Bath Spa University) introduce Stationers’ Register Online (SRO)2 – a new resource that digitises the entries for the literary, musical and artistic works made in the Registers of the Stationers’ Company of London3 between 1557 and 1640. Jane Ginsburg (Columbia Law School) presents a new section on Vatican sources which she (and her team of Latinists) contributed to the Primary Sources digital archive, edited by Lionel Bently (University of Cambridge) and Martin Kretschmer (CREATe, University of Glasgow). The project presentations were followed by a panel discussion, joined by Elena Cooper (CREATe, University of Glasgow) and Neil Netanel (University of California at Los Angeles), two of the national editors of Primary Sources on Copyright. This working paper offers a reference point of wider interest. What should be the ambitions of a primary sources project? Can the history of copyright law be re-written? What is the role of history for policy