Copyright: Its History and Its LawBowker, R. R. (Richard Rogers)
History
Copyright: Its History and Its Law
Bowker, R. R. (Richard Rogers)
Copyright -- History; Copyright -- United States -- History
The coordinate jurisdiction of imperial and local authority continued
into the seventeenth century, and besides a special protection of
official publications, including church texts and school books, there
developed a differentiation between privileged books and protected
authors. The imperial city of Frankfort in 1660 passed an ordinance for
the protection of "_buecher_" and "_autores_" and an imperial patent of
1685 made the curious distinction between "privileged" and
"unprivileged" works, which Puetter, reputed the German apostle of the
modern theory of property in literary productions, writing in 1764,
explains as meaning respectively "non-individual" and "individual"
(_eigenthuemlich_) works, the former those issued under printers'
privileges, the latter the works of contemporary authors, copyrightable
in our modern sense. At the close of the seventeenth century, the
book-fair at Leipzig began to assume dominating importance, and the
privileges from the Commission of the Elector of Saxony became more
authoritative, perhaps, than the imperial privileges issued from
Frankfort.
{Sidenote: In Italy: Venice}
Venice, among whose chief glories were to be the master printers Aldus,
was the first and foremost of the Italian states to encourage the new
art. The first privilege granted by her Senate, in 1469, indeed
ante-dated the first in Germany by thirty-two years, the first in France
by thirty-four years, and the first in England by forty-nine years. This
was to John of Speyer, a German printer, for a monopoly for printing in
Venice for five years, with prohibition of importation of works printed
elsewhere, which he did not live to enjoy. The first known author's
copyright was granted September 1, 1486, to Antonio Sabellico, historian
to the Republic, of the sole right to publish or authorize the
publication of his "Decade of Venetian affairs," not limited in time,
with a penalty of five hundred ducats for infringement. In 1491 the
Senate gave to the publicist Peter of Ravenna and the publisher of his
choice the sole right, without mention of term, to print and sell his
"Phoenix," usually cited as the first instance of copyright. In 1493 one
Barbaro was granted a privilege for ten years in the work of his
deceased brother, and in the same year an editor's copyright was granted
to Joannes Nigro for his edition of "Haliabas," his application being
accompanied by a certificate from learned doctors of Padua of its value
for the community, and a publisher's copyright to Benaliis on
Giustiniani's "Origin of the city of Venice," both apparently without
term. In 1494 a privilege to Codeca contained the condition of fair
price, and another privilege required publication within a year or at
the rate of a folio a day. In 1496 Aldus himself was given the privilege
for twenty years of printing any Greek texts, and in 1501, another for
ten years of printing in cursive or italic characters, an invention of
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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