Copyright Act of 1790

Copyright law in the United States was first codified on a Federal basis by the Copyright Act of 1790, which was signed into law by President Washington on May 31 of that year. In the text of the Bill, it is referred to as "An Act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned."

It served to regularize the legal protection granted to authors in the United States, a function which under the previous system of governance provided for by the Articles of Confederation had been left up to the statutes of individual states.

The Copyright Act of 1790 took its legislative inspiration from the primary English legislation on copyright law, the Statute of Anne, as had been in effect in the former administrator of the American states since 1709. The new American Bill for copyright law expanded on the previous legal protections available to authors by widening its scope from books to charts and maps, presaging the widening of copyright protection to other forms of media that would take place when recording technology became available.

The Copyright Act of 1790 was passed due to the Constitution's empowerment of the newly created Congress to "promote the progress of Science and the Useful Arts by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive right to their respective Writings and Discoveries," as may be found in Article 1, Section 8, Clause 8. As thus implemented by Congress, the new copyright law was conceived as serving the dual purpose of protecting and encouraging authors' activities in creating new books, maps, and charts, and securing the access of the public to the products of authors' labors.

The former task took the form of the granting of a monopoly over a work to the person who had created it, and the latter task the form of limiting the extent of such monopolies and defining which works could not fall under them.

The initial application made under the Copyright Act of 1790 would therefore secure exclusive rights to the author for publishing and reproducing lasting a period of fourteen years. After that time, if the author or his or her heirs still happened to be living, another fourteen-year term of protection would be granted, though it would be contingent on the author or heir submitting an application for such protection. The language of the Copyright Act of 1790 is primarily based on the utilitarian emphasis placed on benefiting society as a whole, rather than on a model based on commerce.

The Copyright Act of 1790 did not require that a book, chart, or map be published in order to be eligible for receiving legal protection. It did require, however, that authors formally apply for a copyright. Otherwise their work could pass into the public domain. In the absence of international agreements on copyright law, these legal measures did not extend to works published or authors working in other countries.

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