This study attempts to fill a gap in the historiography on the formation of American copyright law by exploring the specific historical nature of print culture in the late eighteenth-century which directly influenced copyright’s development. Those who campaigned for copyright protection espoused its broad nationalistic implications in the wake of a socially and politically disruptive revolution, and its eventual legislative design recognized a distinct tension between private interests and the public sphere as it embodied the pervasive republican values of the early national period. This examination seeks to clarify how the conceptual architecture of copyright was initially framed in the United States in order to more insightfully and constructively address the question of the continued utility of its function established by historical precedent.
The first chapter of this study argues that the earliest calls for copyright legislation in the United States immediately after the Revolution were inextricably intertwined with the efforts to construct a distinctly American national identity. As the dictates of print-capitalism were quickly becoming institutionalized, prominent copyright advocates argued that copyright was necessary both to protect the indigenous American authorial class and their labors from the widespread practice of literary piracy and to encourage others to participate in the craft of authorship. They argued provocatively – and successfully – that copyright laws would indeed serve as declarations of cultural independence from Britain, and would help establish America’s cultural parity with the greatest powers in the world. Whereas colonial printmen played the most critical role in shaping American identity throughout the 1760s and 1770s by producing a deluge of literature in opposition to parliamentary imperial policies, I argue that the calls for copyright laws in the post-revolutionary period were an attempt by American intellectual writers to establish their own measure of cultural control over what was a largely unregulated printing industry.
The second chapter of this study demonstrates how eighteenth-century Enlightenment ideals and republican ideology significantly influenced how contemporaries expected the explicit limitedness of copyright terms to function. Through an examination of the concurrent development of learned societies and proposals for publicly funded education systems, I argue that a significant aspect of American political culture was a passion for the “diffusion of knowledge.” As contemporaries understood printed literature to be integral in the production and consumption of knowledge, such understandings strongly influenced the expectations and design of copyright. Additionally, the prevailing ideology of republicanism established a delicate balance between personal and public interests, which ultimately expected the republican citizen to act first and foremost for the benefit of society as a whole. Hence, copyright’s explicit limitedness exhibited the tension inherent in republican ideology: it granted authors only temporary monopolistic control over the publication of their creations so that they could sustain themselves in their labors, so that when the copyright term on a work expired it entered the public domain, from which anyone could freely access, manipulate, or republish it. Explicitly limited terms were not some arbitrary legislative decision, but rather a byproduct of the contemporary fixation on diffusing knowledge through print as extensively as possible among the American populace.