Intellectual Property

First federal copyright law signed 225 years ago today

It’s an old established principle that the creator of a work such as a book, screenplay, photograph or musical composition owns the rights to that work—at least for a specified period of time.

The creator can license or sell the work for profit at his or her discretion. Or a person who composes music, for example, or writes a novel can choose to go it alone, recording or printing and distributing their work as they will.

It’s called copyright and the basic idea is that no one else has the right to take another’s work for personal use or profit without permission.

Copyright law in our country is almost as old as the U.S. itself. The U.S. Constitution authorized copyright legislation and several states had already passed laws protecting authors and artists prior to the document’s passage.

The Copyright Act of 1790—signed into law 225 years ago today—was the first federal law spelling out copyright protection. It provided for a exclusive rights period of 14 years, renewable for another 14 years and that had to be applied for by a work’s creator.

Times have changed, copyright is pretty much automatic these days and the time frame has been much extended. That’s a good thing.

That bad thing is that the public’s respect for copyright appears to be at an all-time low. More and more people thinks it’s no big deal to steal music, books or movies without paying, especially since the Internet has made it so easy to do and so difficult to get caught.

Others even more nefarious have no problem with copying and selling bootleg copies of protected works.

Well, it is a big deal. It’s a crime to take something that doesn’t belong to you. More importantly it’s just plain wrong.

And that should matter to each and every one of us.