Copyright History

"To approach these issues in the proper framework, we should initially review the history of the Constitution’s Copyright Clause and understand its relationship to the First Amendment. A. History and Development of the Copyright Clause The Copyright Clause finds its roots in England, where, in 1710, the Statute of Anne “was designed to destroy the booksellers’ monopoly of the booktrade and to prevent its recurrence.” L. Ray Patterson, Understanding the Copyright Clause, 47 J. Copyright Soc’y USA 365, 379 (2000). This Parliamentary statute assigned copyright in books to authors, added a requirement that only a new work could be copyrighted, and limited the duration, which had been perpetual, to two fourteen-year terms. It is clear that the goal of the Statute of Anne was to encourage creativity and ensure that the public would have free access to information by putting an end to “the continued use of copyright as a device of censorship.” The Framers of the U.S. Constitution relied on this statute when drafting the Copyright Clause of our Constitution, which reads, The Congress shall have Power … to promote the Progress of Science … by securing for limited Times to Authors … the exclusive Right to their respective Writings … . U.S. Const. art. 1, § 8, cl. 8. Congress directly transferred the principles from the Statute of Anne into the copyright law of the United States in 1783, first through a recommendation to the states to enact similar copyright laws, and then in 1790, with the passage of the first American federal copyright statute. The Copyright Clause was intended “to be the engine of free expression.” Harper & Row Publishers, Inc. v. Nation Enters., 471 U.S. 539, 558 (1985). To that end, copyright laws have been enacted achieve the three main goals: the promotion of learning, the protection of the public domain, and the granting of an exclusive right to the author."