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Copyright, Translations, And Relations Between Britain And India In The Nineteenth And Early Twentieth Centuries, Lionel Bently

Chicago-Kent Law Review

This paper examines the tension between trade and development, and its handling in multiple layers of law-making through an historical case study concerning copyright in India in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century. The paper explains the emergence of views in the Government of India of what copyright law should cover that reflected longstanding but not unproblematic assumptions about India's need for European knowledge and learning. The belief that India needed access to European knowledge informed resistance to the desires of British publishers that copyright owners should be able to control the making of translations of their works. These divergences between …