The History of Copyright

1790 - The first U.S. Copyright Act was created by George Washington and enacted by Congress. The statute gave authors of books, maps, and charts ownership of their work for up to 28 years.

1831 - Congress includes musical pieces in the Copyright Act.

1841 -"Fair Use Doctrine" is born in Massachusetts after the Folsom vs. Marsh decision ruled that an author had the right to use letters George Washington wrote to a friend as the basis for a new work.

1908 - Supreme Court rules in favor of White-Smith Music Publishing Company against Apollo Co., maker of player piano scrolls, opining that piano scrolls were not copies and therefore did not infringe.

1909 - Congress amends the Copyright Act to include new technologies like piano rolls and sound recordings.

1975 - Sony introduces Betamax home videocassette recorder. Several companies, including Disney and Universal, sue Sony because the new product makes it easy to copy protected works. The Supreme Court rules in favor of Sony, opining that the machines could be used for non-infringing uses like time shifting, or recording to watch at another time.

1976 - Congress amends the Copyright Act, which, among other things, addresses issues created by new information storage, retrieval, reproduction and display technology and formalizes the fair use doctrine by laying out a four-part standard for determining fair use.

1990 – Architectural works become subject to copyright law

1998 - Congress enacts the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. The Act expands copyright limits by 20 years on existing and future works. Currently, copyrighted works are protected for the author’s life plus 70 years.

1998 – Congress enacts the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which regulates many issues related to digital storage, retrieval, reproduction, and display of copyrighted material.

2000 - Children’s' Internet Protection Act signed into law. CIPA requires all schools and libraries that receive specific federal funds to have in place an Internet Safety Policy that uses Internet filtering technology to blocks access to obscenity, child pornography, or material harmful to minors.

2002 (MAY) – Panel of federal Judges finds CIPA unconstitutional. Federal government appeals decision to the Supreme Court.