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Originally Posted by Ghitulescu
I am not talking about modern books, LOTR and stuff. I am talking about the times when US had no writers, and they stole works from Europe, and Europe complained as US complains today about China.
AFAIK the first time when non-US citizens could get a copyright in the US was after the major reform of the law, in 1923. Wikipedia appears to promote an earlier date, 1891, yet I've searched the online CCE library for non-US citizens and found them only after 1924 - not to say there were none, just that I found none in a rather extensive search.
Even the fact that only in 1976 US adhered to Berne Convention says a lot about this.
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I think you are talking about automatic copyright protection. The flip side is that Britian didn't honor US copyrights at the time either. There were a lot of pirated copies of Poe in England. There were a number of copyright laws in the US over the years, both national as well as state. It wasn't until 1975 that the state laws were explicitly overturned. The US signed some sort of copyright treaty with England in the 1891 that gave some automatic protection to English works.