Early American Printing Privileges. The Ambivalent Origins of Authors’ Copyright in America

Cultural Spillovers: Copyright, Conceptions of Authors, and Commercial Practices

“…There are two dominant philosophies of copyright: a recognition of perpetual ownership rights for authors in the literary property over which they labored, and a statutorily granted, limited monopoly to authors that motivates them to produce creative works that benefit the public (Abrams 1983;Bracha 2008a). In colonial America, copy privileges granted by colonial courts reflected a conception of copyright geared more toward monopolies for the proprietors who produced and distributed books (printers and booksellers) than toward rights imbued in authors (Abrams 1983;Bracha 2008bBracha ,2010b. Proprietors, not authors, usually sought copyright privileges, in part because most authors were gentlemen-scholars who did not seek to profit from their 2 We focused on 1741 (when American magazines were first published) to 1825 because editorial statements and prospectuses were available for 59 percent of magazines founded in the eighteenth century and 51 percent of those founded 1801-1825.…”

“…In 1772, the Connecticut colonial assembly was the first to grant copyright privilege to an author rather than a proprietor (Silver 1958). After the Revolution, the shift toward authors gained momentum (Bracha 2008c(Bracha ,2010a(Bracha ,2010b. American writers, such as spellingbook author Noah Webster and poets Joel Barlow and John Trumbull, lobbied state legislators for copyright protection (Barlow 1783;Grasso 1995;Webster 1843).…”

“…The emergence of the commercial conception of authors began to change American authors' and the public's legal consciousness (Ewick and Silbey 1998) regarding copyright. Indeed, this conception of authorship was partly responsible for the development of copyright law: lobbying by Noah Webster, Joel Barlow, and John Trumbull, who sought to safeguard their literary earnings, helped persuade state legislators to draft copyright statutes (Amory and Hall 2000: 477-78;Bracha 2008cBracha ,2010aBracha ,2010bGrasso 1995). And the development of copyright law changed authors' conceptions of themselves (Grasso 1995;Kaplan 2008;Rice 1997;Wroth and Silver 1952).…”