Our founding Fathers, having been heavily influenced by British common law, set the preface for congressional power to enact patent and copyright protection in our Constitution. This is found in Article I, Section 8 of the United States Constitution. It states, “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.” (US Constitution, 1788).
In 1790, Congress established the term of a copyright at fourteen years from the date of registration. If the author was still alive after the first term, it provided for an additional fourteen years. The 1790 Federal copyright law was written because several authors petitioned Congress for copyrights. It also served to unify the law and put an end to the confusion that was arising because of differing state copyright laws. Congress passed a general bill for copyrights and patents because they did not want to pass private bills for everyone who petitioned for copyrights or patents. To pass private bills would require that Congress evaluate the merits of each writing or invention. According to the law, the registration of the writing, not the creation of the writing was what activated the copyright.
Approximately 779 works were copyrighted during the first decade of the copyright law (Maher, W. J., 2002). Maher states this from a study made by “James Gilreath, editor, and Elizabeth Carter Wills, compiler, Federal Copyright Records 1790-1800 [cited as Gilreath], which was the result of exhaustive modern research into all known records of the first decade of Federal copyright registration.” (Maher, W. J., 2002).
References
US Government. (1788). Constitution of the United States of America.
Maher, W.J. (2002).Copyright term, retrospective extension and the Copyright Law of 1790 in historical context, Unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
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