It is well to point out, perhaps, that these copyright proclamations are not equivalent to copyright treaties, but are only notices that certain conditions exist. Only in the case of one country, _viz._, Germany, has anything been entered into approaching a convention or treaty. Under date of Jan. 15, 1892, an "agreement" was signed with that country to issue a proclamation extending copyright in the United States to German subjects upon an assurance that "Citizens of the United States of America shall enjoy, in the German Empire, the protection of copyright as regards works of literature and art, as well as photographs, against illegal reproduction, on the same basis on which such protection is granted to subjects of the empire." In order to obtain copyright abroad, therefore, an American citizen must ascertain the requirements of the law of each country in which he desires to protect his book or other production and comply explicitly with such requirements. He can, of course, only avail himself of the legal protection accorded, so far as it is within his power to thus comply, and therein lies the difference between the privileges secured under the present international-copyright arrangements, and such as would be obtainable under copyright conventions or treaties. A citizen of the United States may find himself unable to meet the obligations or conditions of the statutes, just as a foreign author may find it practically impossible to comply with the requirements of the United States law, and in either case there would be a failure to secure the protection desired. In the case of a photograph, for example, the English law requires that the "author" of the photograph must be a British subject or actually "resident within the Dominions of the Crown," and the United States law requires that the two copies of the photograph to be deposited in the Copyright Office "shall be printed from _negatives made within the limits_ of the United States," two sets of conditions difficult of fulfilment. By means of a copyright convention exemption could be obtained in either case from these onerous conditions. 6. _Conditions and formalities required by the copyright law._ Two steps are made prerequisites to valid copyright by the laws now in force in the United States. The first of these is the recording of the title in the Copyright Office. For this purpose the statute requires the deposit of "a _printed_ copy" of the title-page, "on or before the day of publication in this or any foreign country." For a number of years it has been the practice of the Copyright Office to accept a typewritten title in lieu of the _printed_ title-page, but in this, as with all other requirements of the law regarding copyright, the preferable course is a strict compliance with the letter as well as the spirit of the law.