Quote:
Originally Posted by Rob Lister
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Below is a short quote from a document entitled "Coda - A Short History of Book Piracy" which can be found at:
http://piracy.ssrc.org/wp-content/up...Coda-Books.pdf.
My earlier post linking to this can be found at:
https://www.mobileread.com/forums/sho...hlight=history
"The American Pirate Century
In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were several efforts to curb state-sponsored
cross-border piracy through bilateral agreements, but a truly international copyright standard
came together only in 1886, when Germany, Belgium, Spain, France, the United Kingdom,
Italy, Switzerland, and Tunisia signed the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and
Artistic Works. From Berne forward, local and cross-border piracy became a more explicit
subject of national attention, if not always of new regulations or sanctions. For many countries,
copyright and enforcement remained exercises in triangulation between the desirability of
cheap access to foreign works, the interests of local publishers, and the demands of international
trading partners. One of the chief pirate nations, in this context, was the United States of
America.
For roughly a century, American copyright law was a clear-cut case of situational piracy—
of behavior legalized under US law but widely condemned abroad. The US federal copyright
statute implemented in 1790 was based closely on the Statute of Anne and replicated its limited
fourteen-year renewable term. But—possibly due to a misinterpretation of the English statute
(Patterson 1968:200)—the US law granted copyrights only and exclusively to US citizens. As
a major importer of British titles, this clause created a massive subsidy for US publishers and
helped establish a de facto cultural policy of cheap books, which in turn became an essential
component of mass public education. This situation persisted until the 1891 Chace Act granted
limited copyright to foreign authors. Another century would pass before the United States
joined the Berne Convention, in 1989."