Termination Rights, Part 3: The British Commonwealth
{4:18 minutes to read} In a prior post, Termination of Transfer – Part 1, I talked about Congress’s implementation of a two-term copyright structure, of 28 years each, in the US Copyright Act of 1909 (the act which governs copyright in works dated before 1978). The stated purpose was to permit authors a “second bite at the apple,” whereby they could profit anew from the exploitation of their works once the first term expired. As noted in that post, the structure failed to achieve its purpose.
However, while Congress went out of its way to justify its 1909 Act structure, the structure certainly wasn’t novel. It was, in fact, the same structure that had been used in prior American copyright acts, and it can be traced back ultimately to the Statute of Anne, [1] the 1709 British statute celebrated as the forebear of modern copyright legislation in the English-speaking world.