The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works : 1886-1986

In 1886, most national copyright laws were not much more than a few decades old. The United Kingdom was, of course, an exception as it had enacted the first modern copyright statute as far back as 1709 (the “Act of Anne”). The scope of this Act was quite limited, and it was restricted to books, but during the next hundred years protection was extended in piecemeal fashion to other kinds of works, including engravings, sculptures and dramatic works. In most other European countries, however, the situation as regarded the protection of authors was similar to that which had obtained in the United Kingdom prior to 1709: there was no express recognition of authors’ rights, and the only protection available was that accorded through the grant of privileges or monopolies for the printing of particular books. These privileges were usually granted by governments to publishers and printers, rather than authors. . . . A similar situation prevailed for longer in most European countries, in particular France, the German and Italian states, and Spain. Even in this country, the members of the Stationers’ Company strove long and hard throughout the eighteenth century to retain their traditional privileges with respect to the printing of books. Thus, it was not until the end of that century that it was firmly established that the rights accorded under the Act of Anne were authors’ rights, rather than publishers’ or printers’ rights. In France, on the other hand, completely new ground was broken when the ancien régime was swept away by the Revolution of 1789. The rights of man, now enshrined in the new revolutionary laws, were soon recognized to include the rights of authors in their works. A Law of 1791 therefore accorded an exclusive right of public performance to the authors of dramatic and musical works for a period lasting five years after their deaths. A second Law of 1793 granted, in respect of all works, what we would now call an “exclusive reproduction right,” enduring for the life of the author. There was a conscious philosophical basis to these laws that was lacking in the Act of Anne, in that the former conceived of the rights of authors as being rooted in natural law, with the consequence that these laws were simply according formal recognition to rights that were already in existence. In the years following the French Revolution, this new conception of authors’ rights spread to other continental European countries, in particular Belgium, the Netherlands and the Italian states. It also influenced the adoption of copyright laws in the various German states after the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire brought an end to the system of imperial privileges that had formerly applied in those states. Other European countries followed suit, and by 1886 almost all the European states, including the newly unified states of Italy and Germany, had enacted their own copyright laws. Outside of Europe, the United States had had a copyright law since 1791, and laws on copyright were to be found in seven other states of Latin America. A number of other countries, such as Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey, protected authors’ rights in a partial or incidental fashion through provisions in their general civil, criminal or press laws.