Law Commons^™

The Legal Landscape: Session 1, Laura Gasaway, Jane C. Ginsburg, Maria Pallante, Shira Perlmutter, Richard Rudick

Faculty Scholarship

Good morning everybody, and thanks for coming. I’m June Besek, the Executive Director of the Kernochan Center for Law, Media and the Arts, and we are especially grateful to those of you who planned to come in November, and when that was postponed still came today. We really feel very grateful to you. This symposium is on copyright exceptions for libraries and section 108 reform, and we are doing this in cooperation with the U.S. Copyright Office. I thank Maria, Chris and Karen for all the work that they put into this as well. I want to thank our sponsors …

Proto-Property In Literary And Artistic Works: Sixteenth-Century Papal Printing Privileges, Jane C. Ginsburg

Faculty Scholarship

This Study endeavors to reconstruct the Vatican’s precursor system of copyright, and the author’s place in it, inferred from examination of over five hundred privileges and petitions and related documents – almost all unpublished – in the Vatican Secret Archives. The typical account of the precopyright world of printing privileges, particularly in Venice, France and England, portrays a system primarily designed to promote investment in the material and labor of producing and disseminating books; protecting or rewarding authorship was at most an ancillary objective.

The sixteenth-century Papal privileges found in the Archives, however, prompt some rethinking of that story because …