LAW OF COPYRIGHT.

INTRODUCTION.

THEORY OF THE RIGHTS OF AUTHORS.

BEFORE we enter upon the field of municipal jurisprudence, it may be well to pass through the more enlarged region of natural law. Literary Property has always asserted claims to a foundation in the principles of general right; and the nature and extent of those claims constitute an important subject of inquiry, whenever the interests of this property

It is somewhat embarrassing, as all students of the Law of Nature know, to use terms accurately descriptive of that code which deals with the general rights of mankind, as held by the publicists of Christendom. The phrase, Natural Law, to an unaccustomed ear, would import simply that body of rules which, by the aid of reason, we deduce from the light of Nature, and which defines only the rights which Nature bestows. But as it has been long used to describe not only the naked

rights of man in the natural state, but also the status of mankind after those rights have been to some extent modified by the conditions of civilized society, I have followed the example which I cannot control. Grotius, Puffendorff, Burlamaqui, and other writers, have fixed the sense in which the term Natural Law is most frequently used; and in this sense, it describes the natural rights of man after he has entered society, though many of them originate before society is formed.

are drawn into controversy, through any defect of positive law. The present inquiry therefore is, whether the right, to which jurists have given the name of Literary Property, has any foundation in the principles of that code of general law, which defines and establishes other kinds of property.

It is, of course, impossible to look to the mere light of nature for a solution of this question, or to find it in any speculations upon the condition of man in that imaginary state, which has been called the state of nature. Perhaps it would not be a violent supposition, to imagine a rude literature of poems or traditions, preserved and orally transmitted, before society, properly so called, has commenced. But, aside from the fact that the merely natural rights of man could confer no exclusive possession of ideas and sentiments thus uttered, it is to be observed, that the act of committing ideas to any corporeal substance, by means of signs, and the multiplication and delivery of copies, thus produced, for a valuable consideration, are things that can only take place after society is formed and an advanced stage of civilization has been reached. The art of printing, as well as every other systematic art of exhibiting ideas to the eye by means of characters, in any form and on any substance, is the creature of society; and when we add to the exercise of such an art the exchange of what is thus created for any other valuable commodity, or for the common representatives of value, we have reached an artificial and refined con