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Introduction

This is a digital archive of primary sources on copyright from the invention of the printing press (c. 1450) to the Berne Convention (1886) and beyond. The UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) funded the initial phase focusing on key materials from Renaissance Italy (Venice, Rome), France, the German speaking countries, Britain and the United States.

For each of these geographical zones/jurisdictions, a national editor has taken responsibility for selecting, sourcing, transcribing, translating and commenting documents. These include privileges, statutes, judicial decisions, contracts and materials relating to legislative history, but also contemporary letters, essays, treatises and artefacts.

The national editors’ brief was to limit the selection to 50 core documents for Germany, France and Britain, and to 20 core documents for Italy and the US (these covering only a shorter period). However, the editors have sourced many more contextual documents which are fully catalogued, and linked to the core materials. Document selection has been scrutinized by an international advisory board.

The five national editors are –

Britain: Dr Ronan Deazley, University of Birmingham
German speaking countries: Dr Friedemann Kawohl, Bournemouth University
France: Dr Frédéric Rideau, Université de Poitiers
Italy: Dr Joanna Kostylo, University of Cambridge
United States: Dr Oren Bracha, University of Texas

The database and website have been designed by Karin Hoehne of Universität Köln, based on the open source Kleio system developed at the HKI Institute (Professor Manfred Thaller). http://www.hki.uni-koeln.de

Following the official launch of the project at Stationers’ Hall in London on 19 March 2008, the URLs for the documents in the archive are permanent.

Please cite this resource as:
Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org

Professor Lionel Bently, University of Cambridge
Professor Martin Kretschmer, Bournemouth University

General Editors, Primary Sources on Copyright








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Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, 10 West Road, Cambridge CB3 9DZ, UK

Copyright statement

You may copy and distribute the translations and commentaries in this resource, or parts of such translations and commentaries, in any medium, for non-commercial purposes as long as the authorship of the commentaries and translations is acknowledged, and you indicate the source as Bently & Kretschmer (eds), Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900) (www.copyrighthistory.org).

You may not publish these documents for any commercial purposes, including charging a fee for providing access to these documents via a network. This licence does not affect your statutory rights of fair dealing.

Although the original documents in this database are in the public domain, we are unable to grant you the right to reproduce or duplicate some of these documents in so far as the images or scans are protected by copyright or we have only been able to reproduce them here by giving contractual undertakings. For the status of any particular images, please consult the information relating to copyright in the bibliographic records.