Recent discussions on the abolition of patents for inventions in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Netherlands : $b Evidence, speeches, and papers in its favour
General
Recent discussions on the abolition of patents for inventions in the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and the Netherlands : $b Evidence, speeches, and papers in its favour
Patents
“An American or any other foreign author, by publishing his work first
in the United Kingdom, may obtain for himself all the benefits of the
English Copyright-Law. One of those benefits, as the law now stands, is
to prohibit its reprint in any portion of Her Majesty’s dominions out of
the United Kingdom. He can equally procure its Copyright in the United
States, and the consequence is that the price of literature is enhanced
to British subjects in all Her Majesty’s Colonial possessions, since to
them and to them only can the prohibition to republish apply or be made
effectual.
“England does not confine the protection which she thus extends to her
own authors. The foreign author is protected against all her Colonial
subjects, provided he publishes first within the confines of Great
Britain and Ireland. She will not recognise a publication in a Colonial
possession as a compliance with the Copyright Act, but limits the place
of publication to the United Kingdom.
“Such the undersigned understands to have been the solemn interpretation
of the law by the House of Lords in the recent case of ‘Routledge and
Lowe’ (‘New Law Report,’ Appeal Cases, vol. ii., pp. 100-121), and he
would very strongly call attention to the unfair position in which the
policy of that law places the Canadian publisher and the Canadian public.
“The mere circumstance of the publishing in the United Kingdom gives
the author a monopoly throughout the entire area of the British
dominions—that author, in the opinion of the then Lord Chancellor Cairns,
need not be a native-born subject of the Crown; he need not be an alien
friend sojourning in the United Kingdom; he need not be sojourning
in a British Colony, but he may be a foreigner residing abroad. This
protection is afforded, in the language of Lord Cairns, to induce the
author to publish his work in the United Kingdom.
“If the policy of England, in relation to Copyright, is to stimulate, by
means of the protection secured to literary labour, the composition of
works of learning and utility, that policy is not incompatible with such
a modification of law as will place the Colonial publisher on a footing
of equality not only with the publisher in the United States, but even
with the publisher in the United Kingdom....
“If the rate of duty, whether import or excise, were inadequate, it would
be an equally reasonable argument against the extension of the law; and
in that case the rate could be augmented.”
TENDENCIES OF COPYRIGHT AMENDERS.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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