Ion's blog

The [British] 1911 Copyright Act was to prove less long-lived than that of 1842, but was much better conceived. It incorporated a principle which was wholly new in British law, but which had long since been accepted in almost all other European countries. Copyright was now firmly linked to the life of the author, and survived him or her by a substantial period of time. Moreover, the author was explicitly in control of the work; the rights of translation, abridgement, dramatization, or any other form of adaptation, were clearly the author’s and only the author’s. He or she might make contractual arrangements about the use of those rights, but their origin and the ultimate ownership were not in doubt. Indeed, for practical purposes, authors had to reach agreements with publishers and others for the production and distribution of their works, but the fundamental rights which the Society of Authors, and individual writers, had sought for so long were now firmly incorporated in the law.

The new Act recognized, for the first time, the wide range of rights which could derive from intellectual products such as written works or musical compositions. Although it was not wholly satisfactory, it did addres the problem of sound recording and of [204] cinematographic films, and clearly established the principle of the rights of the primary creator over what was created. Ambiguities remained, but they were comparatively insignificant at the time, although the problems were to be compounded by technical developments during the next thirty years.

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