Toward a History of Copyright for Periodical Writings: Examples from Nineteenth-Century America

Will Slauter (1)

1 LARCA UMR 8225 - Laboratoire de Recherche sur les Cultures Anglophones

With respect to copyright law, periodicals have followed a different trajectory from books, and much of that difference has to do with the heterogeneous nature of newspapers and magazines. In the early twentieth century, periodicals in the United States and Great Britain obtained blanket copyrights that covered most of their contents, but this logic did not apply in the much more fluid textual universe of the nineteenth century U.S. In the absence of clear copyright legislation for newspapers and magazines, authors and editors debated what could be copied and how such copied material should be acknowledged or given “credit.” Meanwhile, changes in the newspaper and magazine industries led some publishers to claim copyright over individual articles or whole issues of their periodicals. The timing of these claims, and the reactions that they elicited, varied according to the genre and subject matter of the texts in question: serial novels and essays were treated differently than news paragraphs and price lists. Changes in the copyright statute only came later, after individuals had experimented with existing laws and tried to create new norms for the republication of texts. The examples discussed here suggest the need for an approach to copyright history that moves beyond the chronology of legislation and case law to consider the changing practices of writers, editors, and publishers.

Mots clés: Copyright; Periodicals; Newspapers; Magazines; Nineteenth-Century United States

Domaines: Histoire; Littératures; Droit

Will Slauter. Toward a History of Copyright for Periodical Writings: Examples from Nineteenth-Century America. Nathalie Collé, Monica Latham, David Ten Eyck Book Practices & Textual Itineraries - 4 / 2014: From Text(s) to Book(s): Studies in Production and Editorial Processes, , 2014, 2814302302. ⟨hal-01379266⟩