COLONIAL COPYRIGHT.

New Zealand Times, Volume XXX, Issue 4545, 14 October 1875, Page 3

COLONIAL COPYRIGHT.

(From the Pall Mall Gazette .)

The Canada Copyright Bill, introduced the other day by Lord Carnarvon into the House of Lords, is a short Bill of four sections, the object of which is to confirm a Copyright Act passed by the Canadian Legislature, and to remove certain doubts which have arisen whether the Canadian measure may not be repugnant to the order in council of December 12, 1868, suspending all prohibitions contained in Acts of the Imperial Parliament against the importing into Canada and selling there ‘‘foreign reprints of hooka first composed, written, or published in the United Kingdom, and entitled to copyright therein.” The Royal assent to the Canadian Bill, which by clause 3 of the present measure it is declared lawful for her Majesty to grant, will thus have the effect of abrogating the order in council so far as it is inconsistent.with the new colonial legislation ; and save as regards the counter prohibition of the importation of colonial reprints into the United Kingdom, contained in the 4th clause of the BUI, it is by the Canadian “ Act respecting Copyrights ”' that the rights of British authors, and the formalities to be observed for securing them, will be for the future determined. This Act is recited in extenso in the schedule to the Bill now before the House of Lords, and appears to be a satisfactory measure. The class of persons to whom the benefits of the Act extend are defined in section 4, which provides that “ any person domiciled in Canada, or in any part of the British possessions, or being a citizen of any country, having an international copyright treaty with the United Kingdom, who is the author of any book, map, chart, or musical composition, or of any original painting, drawing, statue, sculpture, or photograph, or who invents, designs, etches, engraves, or causes to be engraved, etched, or made from his design, any print or engraving, and the legal representatives of such person, shaU have the sole right and liberty of printing,” &c., subject to the conditions enumerated below. These conditions are (1) that “the said literary, scientific, and artistic works be printed and published, or reprinted or republished, in Canada, or, in the case of works of art, that it be produced or reproduced in Canada, whether they be so published or produced for the first time, or contemporaneously with or subsequently to publication elsewhere; and (2) that no immoral or licentious, or irreligious or treasonable or seditious literary, scientific, or artistic work shall be the legitimate subject of such registration or copyright.” But, further, in order to be entitled to the benefit of the Act, the person claiming copyright must deposit in the office of the Minister of Agriculture two copies of the book, map, print, &c., and in case of paintings, drawings, &c., must furnish a written description of such works of art, to be recorded by the Minister of , Agrilculture in a hook to he kept for that purpose ; and he must, moreover,' give notice of the copyright being secured by printing on the title-page of the book or on the face of . the print the words “ Entered according to Act of Parliament of Canada in the office of the Minister of Agriculture.” In section 10 there follows an important provision for allowing the author of a work or his representatives to obtain an interim copyright pending the publication of republication of a book in Canada, by depositing with the Minister of Agriculture a copy of the title or a designation of the work intended for publication or republication in Canada; such interim registration, however, not to endure for more than a month from the date of the original publication elsewhere. Such a condition, however, obviously could not be fulfilled by the author of a serial story, appearing in, for instance, a monthly magazine ; and with a view to these cases it is further provided that a literary work intended to be published in a pamphlet or hook form, but which is first published in separate articles in a newspaper, may he the subject of registration within the meaning of the Act, provided that the title of the manuscript and a short analysis of the work are deposited in the office of the Minister of Agriculture, and that every separate article so published is preceded by the words, “ Registered in accordance with the Copyright Act of 1875.” As soon, however, as the work is published in a complete form it will be subject besides to the other requirements of the Act ; that is to say, we suppose, that the author will be only entitled to an interim registration of a month from the date of its appearance in England, and must, before the expiration of that time, republish it in its complete form in Canada in order to comply with the Act. Penalties for the infringement of duly secured copyrights are next enacted; and the Act then goes on to provide that works of which the copyright has been granted and is subsisting in the United Kingdom, and copyright of which is not secured or subsisting in Canada under any Canadian or Provincial Act, shall, upon being printed and published or reprinted and republished in Canada, be entitled to copyright ; but nothing in the Act shall ho held to prohibit the importation from the United Kingdom of copies of such works legally printed , there. A penalty of one hundred dollars is attached to failure on the part of any person who has obtained an interim copyright, to print and publish or reprint and republish the work within the time prescribed. It only remains to add that the term of a copyright under this Act is twenty- eight years from the time of its being first recorded, unless the author or one of the authors of the copyright work be at the expiration of that period still living, or, if dead, has left a widow or a child or children living ; in which case the copyright shall be continued to such author, or, if dead, to such child or children, for a further space of fourteen years, subject to the condition that the work be a second time recorded, with all the formalities required in the case of the original copyright, within a year after the expiration of the first term. These provisions, it will have been seen, give protection to all works of English authors who will comply with the conditions of the Bill, whether their works make their first appearance in a complete or in a serial form. The only question which seems to us to arise upon the Bill, is as regards the clause providing for interim copyright pending the publication or republioation of an English work in Canada. The period of a month appears unnecessarily short, and might under easily conceivable circumstances impose upon an author the necessity of delaying the publication of his work in England in order to bring the Canadian republioation within the prescribed time. The clause above noted, attaching a penalty of a hundred dollars to the failure to publish, within the prescribed time, a work of which interim registration has been obtained, seems defectively worded. We can only understand the words “any person” to mean, as in the previous section, “ any person not having legally acquired the copyright,” and must interpret the clause as designed to repress un-

authorised attempts to secure copyright in a work which do not go as far as actual publication of it. But it is necessary to point out the ambiguity in the framing of the clause to which we have referred.