Law / Copyrights / Patents Timeline

"The Code of Ur-Nammu is the oldest known tablet containing a law code surviving today. It was written in the Sumerian language ca. 2100-2050 BC. Although the preface directly credits the laws to king Ur-Nammu of Ur (2112-2095 BC), some historians think they should rather be ascribed to his son Shulgi.

"The first copy of the code, in two fragments found at Nippur, was translated by Samuel Kramer in 1952; owing to its partial preservation, only the prologue and 5 of the laws were discernible. Further tablets were found in Ur and translated in 1965, allowing some 40 of the 57 laws to be reconstructed. Another copy found in Sippar contains slight variants.

"Although it is known that earlier law-codes existed, such as the Code of Urukagina, this represents the earliest legal text that is extant. It predated the Code of Hammurabi by some three centuries.

"The laws are arranged in casuistic form of if-(crime), then-(punishment) — a pattern to be followed in nearly all subsequent codes. For the oldest extant law-code known to history, it is considered remarkably advanced, because it institutes fines of monetary compensation for bodily damage, as opposed to the later lex talionis (‘eye for an eye’) principle of Babylonian law; however, the capital crimes of murder, robbery, adultery and rape are punished with death.

"The code reveals a glimpse at societal structure during the 'Sumerian Renaissance'. Beneath the lu-gal ('great man' or king), all members of society belonged to one of two basic strata: The 'lu' or free person, and the slave (male, arad; female geme). The son of a lu was called a dumu-nita until he married, becoming a 'young man' (gurus). A woman (munus) went from being a daughter (dumu-mi), to a wife (dam), then if she outlived her husband, a widow (nu-ma-su) who could remarry" (Wikipedia article on Code of Ur-Nammu, accessed 02-04-2009).

The Code of Hammurabi  is the best-preserved ancient law code. It was enacted by the sixth Babylonian king, Hammurabi, and inscribed on stelae displayed in temples around the Babylonian Empire. Of these only one example survives, inscribed on a seven foot, four inch tall basalt stone slab or stele, preserved in the Louvre.

"The stele containing the Code of Hammurabi was discovered in 1901 by the Egyptologist Gustav Jéquier, a member of the expedition headed by Jacques de Morgan. The stele was discovered in what is now Khūzestān, Iran (ancient Susa, Elam), where it had been taken as plunder by the Elamite king Shutruk-Nahhunte in the 12th century BC. . . .

"At the top of the stele is a bas-relief image of a Babylonian god (either Marduk or Shamash), with the king of Babylon presenting himself to the god, with his right hand raised to his mouth as a mark of respect.[1] The text covers the bottom portion with the laws written in Akkadian language cuneiform script. The text has been broken down by translators into 282 laws, but this division is arbitrary, since the original text contains no divisional markers" (Wikipedia article on Code of Hammurabi, accessed 02-04-2009).

The Code of Hammurabi applied to medical practice as it mentioned "fees payable to a physician following successful treatment; these varied according to the station of the patient. Similarly, the punishment for the failure of an operation is set out. At least this shows that in Babylon 4000 years ago the medical professional had advanced far enough in public esteeem to warrant the payment of adequate fees" (J. Norman [ed], Morton's Medical Bibliography 5th ed [1991] no. 1).

On 02-04-2009 I was able to access a special video and sound presentation in English on the Code of Hammurabi stele from the Louvre website at this link.

An unusually well-preserved diptych in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, shows how this document format was used during the Roman empire.

"The diptych contains the appointment of a guardian for a woman by the prefect of Egypt. The main body of the text inscribed on the wax is in Latin, followed by a subscription written in Greek by an amanuensis on behalf of the woman, who was illiterate. On the outside there are copies of these sections and a list of the names of seven witnesses, all written in ink directly on the wood. The diptych was originally tied shut and sealed with the seals of the witnesses to prevent tampering with the inner text, the authenticated version, while the exterior text remained available for consultation" (Hunt, R.W., The Survival of the Classics, Oxford: Bodleian Library, 1975, no. 32.)

"By the fourth century, the use of parchment for books was so widespread in the West that we can speak of a general transition from papyrus to parchment in the book-making process. This was of decisive importance for the preservation of literature because only very few papyrus fragments from medieval libraries have survived, since the European climate is inimical to this material. Nonetheless, in the sixth century AD the law codes of Justinian I were distributed from Byzantium in papyrus as well as in parchment manuscripts. One of the latest western papyrus books preserved (c. saec. VII-VIII) [circa 7-8th century] is a Luxeuil codex containing works of Augustine, in which interleaved parchment leaves protect the middle and the outside of the gatherings" (Bischoff, Latin Palaeography, Antiquity and the Middle Ages [1990] 8).

"At the time of the conversion to Christianity, Rome had twenty-eight libraries within its walls and book production was so well established a line of business that Diocletian, in his price edict [Edict on Maximum Prices (also known as the Edict on Prices or the Edict of Diocletian; in Latin Edictum De Pretiis Rerum Venalium)] set rates for various qualities of script: for one hundred lines in 'scriptura optima', twenty-five denarii; for somewhat lesser script, twenty denarii, and for functional script ('scriptura libelii bel tabularum'), ten denarii. The unit of valuation was the normal length of line in a verse of Virgil [Vergil]. The extent of a work is given in these units at the end of some manuscripts (stichometry), and stichometric lists survive for biblical books and for the writings of Cyprian" (Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and the Middle Ages [1990] 182).

Laufer, Diokletians Preisedikt (1971).

In a law Concerning Jews, Heaven-Worshippers, and Samaritans, the Emperor Constantine decreed:

"We wish to make it known to the Jews and their elders and their patriarchs that if, after the enactment of this law, any one of them dares to  attack with stones or some other manifestation of anger another who  has fled their dangerous sect and attached itself to the worship of God [Christianity]  he must speedily be given to the flames and burnt together with all his accomplices.

"Moreover, if any one of the population should join  their abominable sect and attend their meetings, he will bear with them deserved penalties" (Marcus, The Jew in the Medieval World. A Sourcebook: 315-1791, rev. ed. [1999] 4).

Of the Collatio legum Romanarum et Mosaicarum, a fourth-century legal treatise which argued that the laws of Moses were compatible with those of Rome, three primary manuscripts survive, of which the Berlin codex, dated by various scholars from the eighth to the tenth century, is considered the earliest and most authoritative.

"The expansion of Christianity and the codification of Roman law are two of the most significant facets of late antiquity. The Collatio Legum Mosaicarum et Romanarum, or Collation of the Laws of Moses and the Romans, is one of the most perplexing works of late antiquity: a law book compiled at the end of the fourth century by an anonymous editor who wanted to show the similarity between laws of the Hebrew Bible, or Old Testament, and Roman law. Citing first laws from the Hebrew Bible - especially from Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy which he believed were written by Moses - the anonymous Collator then compared corresponding passages from Roman jurists and from Roman laws to form discussions on sixteen topics such as homicide, adultery, homosexuality, incest, and cruelty towards slaves. While earlier scholars wrestled with dating the Collatio, the religious identity of the Collator, and the purpose of the work, this book suggests that the Collator was a Christian lawyer writing in the last years of the fourth century in an attempt to draw pagan lawyers to seeing the connections between the law of a monotheistic God and traditional Roman law." 

From the standpoint of book history this text is significant for its precise references to Roman laws, and the way in which these could be precisely cited.

"Fragmentary preserved notes on a legal lecture from the late fifth century C.E. reveal that professors referred students to their sources [in the Collatio] not only by book and chapter divisions, but also by the page number, in what were evidently uniform copies" (Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History [1997] 30).  

If valid, this would be one of the earliest references to maintaining uniform pagination in the copying of manuscripts. 

The Babylonian Talmud was composed by the late 5th or early 6th  centuries, no later than 541-542 CE when the Black Plague, the so-called Plague of Justinian, appeared in Byzantium.

The Babylonian Talmud comprises more than 1.8 million words. One way to put the size of the document in perspective is to compare it with the other major and legal compilation of the period, the Codex Justinianus, or Digest of the Roman emperor Justinian I, which contains roughly 800,000 words.

"Far beyond any other legal compilation of Late Antiquity, the Babylonian Talmud is marked by a salient characteristic, its continuous and unending dialogue. The debates are not haphazard. Certain authorities who were contemporaries or near-contemporaries debate all sorts of issues related to the Mishnah, issues that are sometimes only remotely relevant to them personally.

"Some statistics will give us an idea of what is happening. The Babylonian Talmud is the creation of at least seven generations of Babylonian authorities, and contains several generations of Israeli authorities as well. However, of the hundreds of authorities mentioned by name, more than forty thousand times in toto, only a dozen or so dominate the discussion and are scattered in pairs. Chronologically, Rav and Samuel, R. Óuna and R. Óisda, R. Naòman and R. Sheshet or R. Yehuda, Abaye and Rava, R. Papa and R. Óuna b. R. Joshua, and R. Ashi overwhelmingly carry forward the debate.

"These debates are often arranged as structured discussions on a given topic, so that they appear to be stenographic records of actual debates. This appearance is literary only, however, as few of these authorities lived in close proximity" (Yaakov Ulman, "The Babylonian Talmud in its Historical Context",  Printing the Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein, 20-21, http://www.printingthetalmud.org/essays/2.html, accessed 12-05-2208).

Thinking that the curriculum is contrary to Christian teachings, Emperor Justinian I closed the last surviving classical school at Athens, causing Constantinople to become the capital of Greek culture.

About this time Justinian appointed a commission of scholars to codify 2000 volumes of legal works, some dating back about 1000 years.

This condensation formed the Codex Justinianus, later known as the Code of Justinian or, after a printed edition of 1583, as the Corpus Juris Civilis. The Corpus Juris Civilis became the basis for civil law in western Europe. It was written and distributed in Latin, which remained the official language of the government of the Empire even though the prevalent language of merchants, farmers, seamen, and other citizens was Greek. By the early 7th century, the official government language of the Byzantine empire segued into ancient Greek under the lengthy reign of Heraclius.

"This code compiled, in the Latin language, all of the existing imperial constitutiones (imperial pronouncements having the force of law), back to the time of Hadrian. It used both the Codex Theodosianus and the fourth-century collections embodied in the Codex Gregorianus and Codex Hermogenianus, which provided the model for division into books that were divided into titles. These codices had developed authoritative standing."

"Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis was distributed in the West but was lost sight of; it was scarcely needed in the comparatively primitive conditions that followed the secession of Italy from the Byzantine empire in 8th century. The only western province where the Justinianic code was effectively introduced was Italy, following its recovery by Byzantine armies (Pragmatic Sanction of 554), but a continuous tradition of Roman law in medieval Italy has not been proven. Historians disagree on the precise way it was recovered in Northern Italy about 1070: perhaps it was waiting unneeded and unnoticed in a library until the legal studies that were undertaken on behalf of papal authority that was central to the Gregorian Reform of Pope Gregory VII led to its accidental rediscovery. Aside from the Littera Florentina, a 6th-century codex of the Pandects that was preserved at Pisa, apparently without ever being publicly consulted, (and removed to Florence after Florence conquered Pisa in 1406), there may have been other manuscript sources for the text that began to be taught at Bologna, by Pepo and then by Irnerius. The latter's technique was to read a passage aloud, which permitted his students to copy it, then to deliver an excursus explaining and illuminating Justinian's text, in the form of glosses. Irnerius's pupils, the so-called Four Doctors of Bologna, were among the first of the "glossators" who established the curriculum of Roman law. The tradition was carried on by French lawyers, known as the Ultramontani, in the 13th century. 

"The merchant classes of Italian communes required law with a concept of equity and which covered situations inherent in urban life better than the primitive Germanic oral traditions. The provenance of the Code appealed to scholars who saw in the Holy Roman Empire a revival of venerable precedents from the classical heritage. The new class of lawyers staffed the bureaucracies that were beginning to be required by the princes of Europe. The University of Bologna, where Justinian's Code was first taught, remained the dominant centre for the study of law through the High Middle Ages" (Wikipedia article on Corpus Juris Civilis, accessed 01-02-2010).

The codex called the Littera Florentina or Codex Florentinus was written during these years. It is the closest survivor to an official version of the Digesta or Pandectae portion of the Corpus Juris Civilis, the digest of Roman law promulgated by Justinian I for the first time in 529, of which no copies survived. What survived was the revised edition of 533-34.

"The codex, of 907 leaves, is written in the Byzantine-Ravenna uncials characteristic of Constantinople, but which has recently been recognized in legal and literary texts produced in Alexandria and the Levant. Close scrutiny dates the manuscript between the official issuance in 533 and 557, making it an all-but contemporary and all-but official source.

"Marginal notes suggest that the codex was in Amalfi—part of the Byzantine territory in Italy governed by the Exarchate of Ravenna in the 6th century— and that it passed to Pisa in the 12th century; the codex was part of the war booty removed from Pisa to Florence after the war of 1406. The manuscript became one of Florence's most treasured possessions. It was only shown to very important persons. Scholarly access was difficult. It took more than three centuries before a reliable edition of the Littera Florentina was finally made available."

"The importance of the manuscript lies in the fact that is an almost unique witness of the original Justinian Digest. Most medieval manuscripts of the Digest have a substantially different text. Its sudden reappearance in the late eleventh or early twelfth century has been much debated by legal historians" (Wikipedia article on Littera Florentina, accessed 12-05-2008).

"A compilation of pre-classical and classical Roman law (written before 245 c.e.), the work was culled from some three thousand books of the Roman jurisconsults and comprises 800,000 words. It is important to note that many of these quotations had been altered during the nearly three centuries of their transmission from the end of the classical period in the middle of the third century. The sources of the Babylonian Talmud, transmitted orally, were also subject to changes in wording, context, and, occasionally, substance.

"The Digest was the major constituent of Justinian’s Code, which we have only in its second edition, completed in 534 by the Roman Jurist, Tribonian. Tribonian headed a committee of sixteen Byzantine law professors, and accomplished this daunting task in just three years. In addition, the Code contained the Institutes, a first-year textbook for law students who would enter the emperor’s bureaucracy trained in his version of Roman law, and the Fifty Decisions, which was supposed
to adjudicate all outstanding differences of opinion. The entire work thus runs to about one million words, and is restricted to civil, or private, law" ((Yaakov Ulman, The Babylonian Talmud in its Historical Context IN: Printing the Talmud: From Bomberg to Schottenstein, 19, http://www.printingthetalmud.org/essays/2.html, accessed 12-05-2208).

The Breviarum Alarici (Breviary of Alaric, Breviarium Alaricianum or Lex Romana Visigothorum), written in southern France in the sixth century, is one of the earliest surviving manuscript codices of Roman law. The text was compiled by order of Alaric II, King of the Visigoths, with the advice of his bishops and nobles, in 506, the twenty-second year of his reign.

"It applied, not to the Visigothic nobles under their own law, which had been formulated by Euric, but to the Hispano-Roman and Gallo-Roman population, living under Visigoth rule south of the Loire and, in Book 16, to the members of the Trinitarian Catholic Church. (The Visigoths were Arian and maintained their own clergy.)

"It comprises:

◊"sixteen books of the Codex Theodosianus;

◊"the Novels of Theodosius II, Valentinian III, Marcian, Majorian and Libius Severus

◊"the Institutes of Gaius

◊"five books of the Sententiae Receptae of Julius Paulus

◊"thirteen titles of the Gregorian code;

◊"two titles of the Hermogenian code

◊"and a fragment of the first book of the Responsa Papiniani" (Wikipedia article on Breviary of Alaric, accessed 01-03-2010).

The codex is preserved in the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek (Clm 22501).

The Cathach of St. Columba (The Cathach/The Psalter of St. Columba) a late sixth century or early early seventh century Irish Psalter, of which 58 leaves of the original circa 110 leaves survive, was traditionally associated with the copy "made at night in haste by a miraculous light" by St. Columba of a Psalter loaned to him by St. Finnian. St. Finnian disputed Columba's right to keep the copy, and King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill attempted to settle the dispute by making the judgment ‘To every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy’. The arbitration failed and the Psalter of St Columba passed into the hands of the O'Donnells after the pitched battle of Cúl Dreimhne in 561, in which many men were killed. As penance for these deaths caused by the dispute over the copy, Columba suggested that he work as a missionary in Scotland to help convert as many people as had been killed in the batle. He also promised tomove from Ireland and never again to see his native Ireland. The Cathach is the oldest surviving manuscript written in Ireland and the second oldest surviving Latin Psalter. However scholars doubt that the manuscript was actually written by St. Columba. 

"The Cathach is the first Insular book in which decoration begins to assume a significant role in articulating the text, with its decorated initials (their crosses and fish perhaps influenced by manuscripts associated with production in Rome under Pope Gregory the Great, combined with native Celtic ornament) and the diminuendo effect of the following letters linking them to the actual text script. Herein lie the origins of the magnificent full-page illuminated incipits of the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells." (Michelle P. Brown, Preaching with the Pen: the Contribution of Insular Scribes to the Transmission of Sacred Text, from the 6^th to 9^th Centuries [2004]).

"An Cathach (meaning ‘the Battler’) was a very important relic used by the Clan Ó Domhnaill (O’Donnell Clan), the old Gaelic royal family in Tír Chonaill (mainly modern County Donegal) in the west of Ulster. It was used as a rallying cry and protector in battle. It was said to protect and guarantee victory in war to the Donegal leaders. Before a battle it was customary for a chosen monk/holy man (usually attached to the McGroarty clan, and someone who was sinless) to wear the Cathach in its cumdach around his neck and then walk three times around the troops of O’Donnell. It is the oldest surviving manuscript in Ireland, and the second oldest Latin psalter in the world. The name of the book derives from the Irish Gaelic word cath (pronounced KAH) meaning ‘battle’. An Cathach means ‘the battler’. The hereditary protectors/keepers of An Cathach were the Mag Robhartaigh/McGroarty clan from Ballintra in south Donegal. An Cathach, the Battler, has been dated to around the period 590 to 600 AD. The decoration throughout An Cathach is limited to the initial letters of each psalm. An Cathach is now housed in the Royal Irish Academy (entrusted to them in 1842).

"The manuscript was rediscovered in the cumdach in 1813, and given by its last hereditary keeper to the Royal Irish Academy in 1843. The leaves were stuck together until carefully separated at the British Museum in 1920; the manuscript was further restored in 1980-81.

"The specially made cumdach or book shrine is in the National Museum of Ireland. The initial work on the case was done between 1072 and 1098 at Kells, but a new main face was added in the 14th century with a large seated Christ in Majesty flanked by scenes of the Crucifixion and saints in gilt repoussé (NMI R2835, 25.1 cm wide).This was done by Cathbharr Ó Domhnaill, chief of the O'Donnells and Domhnall Mag Robhartaigh, the Abbot of Kells. The shrine cover consists of a brass box measuring 9 inches long, 8 inches wide and 2 inches thick. The top is heavily decorated with silver, crystals, pearls and other precious stones. It shows an image of the Crucifixion and an image of St Colm Cille " (Wikipedia article on Cathach of St. Columba, accessed 01-01-2012).

The Oldest Historical Case Law on Copyright

"The earliest recorded historical case-law on the right to copy comes from ancient Ireland. The Cathach is the oldest extant Irish manuscript of the Psalter and the earliest example of Irish writing. . . . It is traditionally ascribed to Saint Columba as the copy, made at night in haste by a miraculous light, of a Psalter lent to Columba by St. Finnian. A dispute arose about the ownership of the copy and King Diarmait Mac Cerbhaill gave the judgement 'to every cow belongs her calf, therefore to every book belongs its copy.' (Wikipedia article on History of Copyright Law, accessed 01-01-2012).

The production of manuscripts, and evidence of interest in books, did not begin in Germany until the last third of the eight century, just before the reign of Charlemagne.

"Few books written before this period were preserved in cathedral libraries. A codex written toward the year 700 for Basinus, who was perhaps the bishop of Trier, is preserved in the Bibliotheca Vallicelliana. Two manuscripts of canon law, one written in South France at the time of Gregory the Great, the other written about a century later in Northumbria, are still the property of the Cathedral of Cologne, to which they probably already belonged in the eighth century" (Bischoff, Manuscripts and Libraries in the Age of Charlemagne [2007] 18).

When I accessed the website of German rare book and manuscript dealer Dr. Jörn Gunther on 06-16-2009 I found the following manuscript offered for sale under the heading, "The Oldest Western European Codex in Private Hands."

The history of the writing of this manuscript as understood through its palaeography described below. The texts which it contains, and the details of its provenance reflect significant aspects of Carolingian manuscript production, and the history of collecting medieval manuscripts. Here is Dr. Gunther's description:

"Canones conciliorum. Manuscript on vellum, written by an insular scribe. Northern Italy, c.775.

"223 x 175 mm. 94 leaves. Internally complete, lacking one gathering at the beginning and some leaves at the end. The quires are signed with Roman numbers from II-XIII.– Written space fol.1-64v:165 x 130 mm, on fol. 65-94v: 175 x 135 mm, ruled in blind for one column of 24-25 and 19-20 lines. fol. 1-60v written in half uncials and precarolingian minuscules, fol. 61-94v in precarolingian minuscules in olive grey, light brown and dark brown ink. Many capitals in uncial with simple decoration with penwork ornament, including one initial in a form of a fish.– In fine condition for a volume of such antiquity. Right upper corner on fol.70 torn away with some loss of text.– 19th-century brown morocco by the Parisian bookbinder Marcelin Lortic.

"PROVENANCE:

"1. The codex was written by an insular scribe from Ireland or Northumbria, working in Northern Italy.

2. Monastery of Reichenau in Germany (at an early date).

3. Bound in Paris by Marcellin Lortic who opened his shop in the Rue St Honoré in 1840.

4. Ms. 17.849 of the collection of Sir Thomas Phillipps (1792-1872); his oldest western manuscript and one of Phillipps's greatest treasures.

5. William Robinson Ltd., cat. 81: Precious Manuscripts, Historic Documents and Rare Books, London 1950, no. 92.

6. Dr. Martin Bodmer, Geneva, Switzerland (1899-1971).

7. Peter and Irene Ludwig, Aachen, ms.XIV 1 (1978-1983).

8. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Malibu (1983-1988).

9. Now: Private collection, Europe.

"TEXT:

"fol.1-58: Canones Conciliorum– fol.58-77v: Symmachiana, so-called ‘Symmachian forgeries’– fol.77v-94v: Decretals of Siricius, Boniface I, Innocent I, Zosimus, and Celestine I; end of text missing. Following the death of Pope Gelasius I († 496) Dionysius Exiguus (c.470- c.555), a skythian monk in Rome, was commissioned by the papal court to compile the ‘Collectio Dionysiana’ which united the canons of the councils and papal decretals. This anthology was the first compilation of this kind carried out in the Western Church and forms the foundation of Western Latin canon law. The compilation of Dionysius exists in three editions of which the codex at issue represents the so-called ‘Dionysiana II’. Manuscripts of the ‘Dionysiana II’ are rare uncombined with other texts, while only one codex preserved as a complete book is of an earlier date: ms.fol.v.II.3 in St Petersburg (Rossijskaja Nacionalnaja Biblioteka), a Burgundian codex dating from the 7th century (CLA 11 no.1061). Apart from this manuscript only a fragment in the Biblioteca Amploniana in Erfurt (Ampl.2°74) can be dated earlier having been written during the second half of the 6th century, presumably in Italy.

"After the Canones Conciliorum there follows as an insert, which cannot be found in this form in comparable collections, the so-called ‘Symmachian forgeries’, dating from thetime of Pope Symmachus (498-514; see Landau 1998). He was elected pope after the death of Anastasius II by a certain faction; a second faction declared the archpriest Laurence as pontiff. As a result of the turmoil which followed the elections, the ‘Symmachian forgeries were written, which strove to demonstrate by means of fictitious papal case files that the pope would not be subject to a human court of justice, but solely to the judgment of God.

"The third component of the book comprises decretals compiled under the pontificate of Pope Hormisdas (514-523) and contains the complete corpus of the old canon law, which consisted of the decrees of the Middle Eastern, Greek, African and Roman councils as well as those of the popes. The compilation is known as the Sanblasianus edition, because it was edited on the basis of a manuscript which first belonged to St. Blasien in the Black Forest and then to St. Paul in Lavanttal (Stiftsbibliothek, cod.7/1). Only seven manuscripts of this edition are preserved, three of which are older than the present codex (Paris, BN, lat. 3836, dating from the second half of the 8th century; Cologne, Dombibliothek, ms.213 dating from the first third of the 8th century and the Sanblasianus, which also dates from the mid-8th century). The oldest manuscript within the group (Cologne, Dombibliothek, ms.213) was written in Northumbria and brought to Cologne in the 8th century.

"The Canones conciliorum gained such an importance in subsequent decades that the text was duplicated again and again in the Frankish empire and from this later period over 100 manuscripts are preserved in the Frankish area alone. The codex was written by three different scribes. The main scribe (fol.2-60v) wrote the Canones conciliorum as well as the opening of the ‘Symmachian forgeries’. Palaeographic analysis reveals that this scribe came to the continent from an insular scriptorium and finally settled in northern Italy. It is not ascertainable, however, in which northern Italian scriptorium the manuscript was written. The palaeographic indications cannot be used to date the manuscript to a specific year, but it is very likely that it was executed in the years around 775, making the present manuscript contemporary with the famous copy of the Canones compilation, the so-called Dionysio-Hadriana,which was presented to the Frankish ruler Charlemagne (768-814) by Pope Hadrian I (772-795) in Rome in 774. After the presentation, the wording of the statute book was made compulsory for the Frankish empire, and numerous transcripts of the codex, originally kept in Aachen and now lost, were produced."

Note: I reformatted the description somewhat for this database, and left out the bibliographical references cited at the end of Dr. Gunther's description. The web page, which may be accessed at the link under Dr. Gunther's name at the beginning of this database entry, also reproduces three images of the manuscript. The hyperlinks are my additions.

According to Elias Avery Lowe's (E. A. Lowe's) Codices Latini Antiquiores, and its supplements, approximately 1884 manuscript codices or fragments survive of texts written in Latin before 800 CE.

From the fifth century only 113 codices or fragments survive.

From the sixth century only 157 codices or fragements survive.

From the seventh century only 198 codices or fragments survive.

From the period from 550 to 750, considered the Dark Ages, only 264 codices or fragments survive.

From the eighth century only 834 codices or fragments survive.

"Of these 264 [surviving from the Dark Ages] only a tenth (26) are secular works, and most of these of a technical nature. Eight of them are legal texts, 8 are medical, 6 are works of grammar, 1 is a gromatic text. It is clear from the historical evidence that the basic arts of life went on; education, law, medicine and the surveying necessary to administration and the levying of taxes still required manuals and works of reference, and these needs are duly reflected in the pattern of manuscript survival" (Reynolds [ed.], Texts and Transmission. A Survey of the Latin Classics [1983] xvi).

Persian mathematician, astronomer and geographer Abū ʿAbdallāh Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, a scholar in the House of Wisdom in Baghdad, published Al-Kitāb al-mukhtaṣar fī ḥisāb al-jabr wa-l-muqābala (Arabic: الكتاب المختصر في حساب الجبر والمقابلة The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing. This was written "with the encouragement of the Caliph Al-Ma'mun as a popular work on calculation and is replete with examples and applications to a wide range of problems in trade, surveying and legal inheritance. The term algebra is derived from the name of one of the basic operations with equations (al-jabr) described in this book. It provided an exhaustive account of solving polynomial equations up to the second degree, and introduced the fundamental methods of 'reduction' and 'balancing', referring to the transposition of subtracted terms to the other side of an equation, that is, the cancellation of like terms on opposite sides of the equation" (Wikipedia article on Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī, accessed 01-23-2010).

The work was translated in Latin as Liber algebrae et almucabala by Robert of Chester (Segovia, circa 1145) from which our word "algebra" originates, and also by Gerard of Cremona. Robert of Chester's translation was translated into English as Robert of Chester's Latin Translation of the Algebra of Al-Khowarizmi with an Introduction, Critical Notes and an English Version by Louis Charles Karpinski (1915). Karpinski included a survey of the manuscripts of Chester's text available to him.

More than one million charters survive, either as originals or early copies, from the period of Norman rule in Britain, from 1066 to 1307. Many of these documents are records of property and land transactions written in Latin and recorded by religious or royal institutions. They are fundamental source material for historical research in medieval politics, economics and society.

Through these charters historians can study the rise and fall of military and religious organizations, among many other topics. For example, charters show how the Knights Hospitallers, or the Order of Saint John, a religious organization founded around 1023 to provide care for poor, sick or injured pilgrims to the Holy Land, became a religious and military organization after the Western Christian conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 during the First Crusade, when it was charged with the care and defense of the Holy Land.

In the late seventeeth and early eighteenth centuries dating medieval charters was one of the problems which motivated Mabillon and Montfaucon to pioneer the science of palaeography. However, at least one million of the Norman charters remain undated, largely due to adminstrative changes introduced by William the Conqueror in 1066. To solve problem of dating the huge number of undated charters Gelila Tilahun and colleagues at the University of Toronto are applying computer-automated statistical techniques with the goal of reducing the time and effort to date them manually, and to improve the accuracy of assigned dates.

"Their approach is to use a subset of some 10,000 charters that are dated and to look for changes in language over time that could be used to date other documents. For example, Tilahun and co say that the phrase “amicorum meorum vivorum et mortuorum”, which means 'of my friends living and dead', was popular between the years 1150 and 1240 but not at other times. And the phrase 'Francis et Anglicis', which is a form of address meaning 'to French and English', was phased out when England lost Normandy to the French in 1204. However, the statistical approach is much more rigorous than simply looking for common phrases. Tilahun and co’s computer search looks for patterns in the distribution of words occurring once, twice, three times and so on. 'Our goal is to develop algorithms to help automate the process of estimating the dates of undated charters through purely computational means,' they say.  

"This approach reveals various patterns which they then test by attempting to date individual documents in this set. They say the best approach is one known as the maximum prevalence technique. This is a statistical technique that gives a most probable date by comparing the set of words in the document with the distribution in the training set.  

"Tilahun and co say their approach also has other applications. For example, the same technique could be used to work out authorship and to weed out forgeries, of which there are known to be a substantial number.  

"So how well does it work in practice? These guys finish their paper with a fascinating anecdote about a medieval English charter that was discovered in a drawer at the library of Brock University near Niagara Falls.  T

"The charter lacked a data so various historians attempted to work out when it was written. The first estimates pointed to the 14th century but these were later revised to the 13th century. Eventually, by comparing the charter to other records, one academic pinned it down to a date between 1235 and 1245.  

"Inspired by the media interest in this charter, Tilahun and co ran the document through their automated maximum prevalence procedure. 'The date estimate we obtained was 1246,' they say, with just a little hint of pride. Not bad!" (MIT Technology Review, 01-16-2013, accessed 01-16-2013).

Gelila Tilahun, Andrey Feuerverger, and Michael Gervers, "Dating medieval English charters," Annals of Applied Statistics VI (2012) 1615-1640.

In January 1215 a group of English barons demanded a charter of liberties and protection against arbitrary behavior by King John.

In May the barons took up up arms and captured London.

"By 10 June both parties met and held negotiations at Runnymede, a meadow by the River Thames. The concessions made by King John were outlined in a document known as the 'Articles of the Barons', to which the King's great seal was attached, and on 19 June the barons renewed their oaths of allegiance to the King. Meanwhile the royal chancery produced a formal royal grant, based on the agreements reached at Runnymede, which became known as Magna Carta (Latin for 'the Great Charter')."

Four copies of the original Magna Carta grant survive. Two from the library of Sir Robert Bruce Cotton are preserved in the British Library. The others are in the archives of Lincoln Cathedral and Salisbury Cathedral. According to contemporary chronicles, copies were sent out from the royal chancery to bishops, sheriffs and others throughout the land, but the exact number of copies distributed is unknown.

• The original text of Magna Carta was first printed from one of the Cottonian copies roughly 500 years later, in 1733, perhaps to safeguard the text. In 1731 one of Cotton's copies had been damaged in a fire which destroyed other manuscripts from Cotton's library then stored at Ashburnham House. The first edition was engraved and printed on vellum as a facsimile of the original by John Pine, an engraver and publisher of prints and illustrated books.

• You can view a virtual copy of Magna Carta at the British Library website at this link (accessed  05-17-2009).

One of the first prose works in the Low German (Middle Saxon) language, The Sachsenspiegel ("Saxon Mirror"),  is the most important law book and legal code of the German Middle Ages. "Written ca. 1220 as a record of existing law, it was used in parts of Germany until as late as 1900, and is important not only for its lasting effect on German law, but also as an early example of written German prose, as the first large legal document to be written in German, instead of Latin. A Latin edition is known to have existed, but only fragmented chapters remain."

"Four (of the original seven) illuminated manuscript copies are still extant. They are named after their present locations: Heidelberg, Oldenburg, Dresden, and Wolfenbüttel, and date from about 1300 to 1370."

"The Sachsenspiegel is believed to have been compiled and translated from Latin by the Saxon administrator Eike von Repgow at the behest of his liege lord Graf Hoyer von Falkenstein in the years 1220 to 1235. Where the original was compiled is unclear. It was thought to have been written at Burg Falkenstein, but Peter Landau, an expert in medieval canon law recently suggested that it may have been written at the monastery of Altzelle (now Altzella).

"The Sachsenspiegel served as a model for law books in German (Middle High German) like the Augsburger Sachsenspiegel, the Deutschenspiegel, and the Schwabenspiegel. Its influence extended into Eastern Europe, the Netherlands, and the Baltic States." (quotations from the Wikipedia article on the Sachsenspiegel, accessed 11-23-2008).

The University of Naples Federico II was founded by Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II on 5 June 1224. It may be the oldest state-supported institution of higher education and research in the world.

"Frederick II had a precise political project when he stated to found the university in Naples: first, to train administrative and bureaucracy skilled professionals for the "curia regis" (the kingdom ministries and governance apparatus), also it was necessary to prepare lawyers and judges who would help the sovereign in order to draft laws and executing justice; secondly he wanted to facilitate the promising young students and scholars in their cultural formation, avoiding their unnecessary and expensive trips abroad (that is also more pragmatically to say that by creating a State University, emperor Frederick avoided that young students of his reign will complete their trainining at University of Bologna which was a city hostile to the imperial power). The University of Naples was arguably the first to be formed from scratch by a higher authority, rather than upon an already-existing private school. Although its claim to be the first state-sponsored university can be challenged by Palencia (which was founded by the Castilian monarch c.1212), Naples was certainly the first chartered one.

"The artificiality of its creation posed great difficulties in attracting students (Thomas Aquinas was one of the few who came in these early years). The university's early years were further complicated by the long existence, in nearby Salerno of Europe's most prestigious medical faculty, the Schola Medica Salernitana. The fledgling faculty of medicine at Naples had little hope to compete with it, and in 1231, the right of examination was surrendered to Salerno. The establishment of new faculties of theology and law under papal sponsorship in Rome in 1245 further drained Naples of students, as Rome was a more attractive location. In an effort to revitalize the dwindling university, in 1253, all the remaining schools of the university of Naples moved to Salerno, in the hope of creating a single viable university for the south.But that experiment failed and the university (minus medicine) moved back to Naples in 1258 (in some readings, Naples was "refounded" in 1258 by Manfred Hohenstaufen, as by this time there were hardly any students left). The Angevin reforms after 1266 and the subsequent decline of Salerno gave the University of Naples a new lease on life and put it on a stable, sustainable track" (Wikipedia article on University of Naples Federico II, accessed 01-24-2012).

The earliest dated evidence of the pecia system of providing "certified texts" of manuscripts in university bookstores is the Vercelli contract of 1228. This coincided with the foundation of the university at Vercelli, which was "the world's first university funded by public money": 

" 'Item habebit commune Vercellarum duos exemplatores, quibus taliter providebit quod eos scolare habere possint, qui habeant exemplantia [exemplaris?] in utroque iure et in Theologia compretentia et correctam tam in text quam in gloxa, ita quod solutio fiat a scolaribus pro exemplis secundum quod convenit ad taxationem Rectorum' ('Item, the commune of Vercelli will provide two exemplatores who are to have exemplaria in both laws and in theology, complete and correct both in text and gloss, so that the scholars may pay for their copies at a price set by the rectors'). This contract was signed on 4 April 1228 between certain masters of the University of Padua who wished to secede from that university and representatives of the commune of Vercelli, who were ready to bid generously in privileges to attract a new university to their city. The University of Padua was then only six years old and it is not credible that in such a short space of time the pecia could have been created there. The University of Padua was formed in 1222 by a secession from the University of Bologna, and it seems to be plain that it was in that older university that the pecia system had its origin about the year 1200.

"The spread of the system

"The pecia system existed in at least eleven universities: at Bologna [founded 1088], Padua [founded 1222], Vercelli, Perugia (founded in 1308), Treviso (1318) and Florence (1349) in Northern Italy: at Salamanca [founded 1134] in Spain (1254) and Naples in Southern Italy (1224); at Paris [founded 1257] and Toulouse [founded 1229] in France; and at Oxford. No trace of it has been found at Salerno, Montpellier, Orléans, Angers, Avignon or Cambridge, or in any of the German or Dutch universities. Actual exemplaria and pecia copies were identified by Destrez from Bologna, Paris, Oxford and Naples, but none from the other seven universities have yet been recognised; and we only know that they provided for the pecia system in their statutes" (Pollard, "The pecia system in the medieval universities," Parkes & Watson (eds) Medieval Scribes, Manuscripts & Libraries. Essays presented to N.R. Ker [1978] 147-48).

"Generally speaking, the purpose of the system was to provide reliable copies of the works of contemporary scholastic authors in law, theology, philosophy and pastoral aids, and it worked somewhat as follows. A university bookseller (stationarius) would obtain an autograph copy of an author's work, or, if that were hard to read (or if the author were long dead), a fair copy or other reliable exemplar of the work. From this exemplar the stationer made a copy or exemplar of his own on equal quires or pieces (peciae), each one of which was numbered in sequence, so that the stationer, when requested for copies of the text in question, could hire out these pieces in turn for copying to professional writers. . . ." (L. E. Boyle, Peciae, Apopeciae, and a Toronto MS. of the Sententia Libri Ethicorum of Aquinas, in Ganz (ed.) The Role of the Book in Medieval Culture [1986] 71).

The standard and extensively illustrated monograph on the pecia system remains Destrez, La pecia dans les manuscrits universitaires du XIIIe et du XIVe siècle (1935).

Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II of Sicily, from his court in Palermo, banned the use of paper for notarial documents, believing it to be less permanent than parchment or vellum. Its use in the chanceries was mainly restricted to drafts, registers, minutes.

Bernhard Bischoff, Latin Palaeography: Antiquity and Middle Ages (1990) 12.

James I the Conqueror, King of Aragon, Count of Barcelona, and Lord of Montpellier,  promulgated a "sumptutary law" forbidding certain groups of the population from wearing "estampados" or printed fabrics. This is the earliest documentation that printed textiles existed in Europe.

Carter, Invention of Printing in China 2nd ed (1955) 198, footnote 8.

Henry de Bracton (or Bretton or Bratton) wrote De legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae (On the Laws and Customs of England). 

"The outstanding common-law treatise of the Middle Ages, it is remarkable for its use of actual court decisons for illustrative purposes. It appears to have been written by a number of authors in the 1250's, with the last work being done on it by Henry de Bracton when he was a judge of the King's Bench."

Bracton's original manuscript did not survive.

"There are approximately 49 surviving manuscripts of Bracton, many fragmentary or abridged. All date from the c14 or very late c13, and none is closer than third generation from the original." (quotations from Harvard Law School Library Bracton Online, accessed 12-30-2008).

Bracton's De Legibus was first published in print by Richard Tottel, London, 1569.

Henry III established the Domus Conversorum (House of the Converts), a building and institution in London for Jews who converted to Christianity. The building provided a communal home and low wages needed by Jews because all Jews who converted to Christianity forfeited all their possessions.

With the expulsion of the Jews by Edward I (Longshanks) in 1290, the Domus Conversorum became the only way for Jews to remain in England. At that stage there were about eighty residents, out of a former Jewish population in England estimated at 3000. By 1356, the last of these converts died. Between 1331 to 1608, only 48 converts were admitted. The warden of the facility was also Master of the Rolls.

The Domus Conversorum was in Chancery Lane. No records for converts/residents exist after 1609, but, in 1891, the post of chaplain for the facility was abolished by Act of Parliament and the location, which had been used to store legal archives, became the Public Record Office, now called The National Archives.

The English law, "De Scandalis Magnatum", prohibited the distribution of "any false News or Tales, whereby discord, or occasion of discord or slander may grow between the King and his People, or the Great Men of the Realm." [3 Edw. 1, ch. 34 (1275)]. Although this might at first sound like a reasonable way of protecting officials from slander, in fact, the application of 'De Scandalis' established the principle that even those who made negative comments about the King or government could be called before a select group of officials without need for any warrant or other legal proceeding even if the comments were truthful. Known as the Star Chamber [since 1422] because of the decor of the room in which they held their proceedings, this tribunal had the power to confer any punishment they pleased for the crime of 'endangering the public peace' by criticizing a monarch or other official" (http://www1.assumption.edu/ahc/1770s/ppressfree.html, accessed 01-04-2010).

The earliest surviving statute concerning the regulation of the book trade in Paris by the University occurred on this date. 

"Libraires represented a serious potential danger to the university, because they controlled the supply of books without which the university would be crippled. Therefore, the university's regulations of libraires concentrated first and foremost on the selling of 'used' university texts, attempting by a variety of means to ensure that the libraire did not swindle either the seller or the buyer, and that he took only a modest commission. The libraires had to guarantee their compliance by posting a bond. . . .

"In addition to regulating the sale of existing books, the university also regulated the rental of examplars from which students and masters could copy, or hire someone to copy, new manuscripts of their own. In this the university initially must simply have put its stamp of approval on a process already informally in operation. To judge from the wording of surviving regulations through the years, the university evinced concern primarily with rental price and correct texts. In 1323 the stationers were forbidden to withdraw an examplar from circulation without  first informing the university. . . ." (Richard A. Rouse and Mary A. Rouse, Manuscripts and their Makers. Commercial Book Producers in Medieval Paris 1200-1500 [2000] 76-77).

Spectacles, so essential for reading and writing, and an important factor in the spread of literacy, are thought to have been invented in thirteenth century Europe; however, their inventor is unknown. Various unsubstantiated theories were proposed over the centuries concerning possible inventors—none supported by satisfactory evidence. Some of the theories are mentioned in the Wikipedia article on Glasses.

Other contenders and snippets of evidence regarding possible inventors are listed on the London College of Optometrists web page on the Invention of Spectacles. Even though the name of the inventor or inventors of spectacles may never be confirmed, there is sufficient reason to believe that spectacles were invented toward the end of the thirteenth century, and that they became more widely used as the fourteenth century advanced.

"Venice was a major centre of glass production, and by the end of the thirteenth century eyeglasses had certainly become an object of general use there, as we can tell from an ordinance dated 2 April 1300 aimed at makers of glass and crystal. It prohibited them from perpetrating a fraud that must have become widespread: 'acquiring or causing to acquired, and selling or causing to be sold, ordinary lenses of colourless glass, under the pretense that they are crystal, for example buttons, handles, discs for kegs and for the eyes ('roidi de botacelis et da ogli'), tablets for altar pictures and crosses, and magnifying glasses ('lapides ad legendum'). The penalty was a fine and the smashing of the fraudulent object. The precise distinction made in the document between eyeglasses and magnifying glasses establishes clearly just what each of the named objects is, and since words preserve their own past like fossils preserved in amber, I note that the term Brille, which means eyeglasses in German, is derived from berillium, the medieval latin word for crystal (Frugoni, Inventions of the Middle Ages [2007] 7 and footnote 25).

The "Writers of Court and Text Letter" or "Writers of the Court Letter" delivered a petition to the Mayor and Aldermen of the City of London, to establish a monopoly of their profession by forming a corporate body whose members are governed and protected. 

"They were first mentioned, with the limners and barbers, as an accepted professional class as early as 1357. Seven years later, in 1364, the Writers doubtless considered that the general direction for the good government of all the crafts in the City of London applied to them because a copy of the enrollment of that article is the second entry in their records" (http://www.british-history.ac.uk/report.aspx?compid=35888, accessed 02-28-2009).

♦ In 1617 group secured a Royal Charter from James I as the Worshipful Company of Scriveners.

Henry VI of England granted the earliest known English patent for invention to Flemish-born John of Utynam through an open letter marked with the King's Great Seal called a Letter Patent.

The patent gave John a 20-year monopoly for a method of making stained glass that had not previously been known in England,  for creating the stained glass windows of Eton College.

Though English patent system is the world's oldest continuously operating system of patents, the first English patent was not the oldest patent, as Venice was granting patents to glass makers in the 1420s.

Johann Fust, a merchant and money-lender, filed a lawsuit at the Court of the Archbishop of Mainz against Johannes Gutenberg to recover money that he had advanced to Gutenberg beginning in 1450. This is one of the few extant documents that may imply Gutenberg's place in the history of printing by movable type, though nothing concerning printing is specifically mentioned in the document. It is also possible, according to Paul Needham, that the document may be Gutenberg's personal copy, endorsed in his hand.

Fust's total claim against Gutenberg was 2026 gulden with interest. As a result of the lawsuit Gutenberg most probably paid back Fust's investment plus interest. Whether Fust gained possession of Gutenberg’s press and equipment, used for what the document calls the "Work of the Books," is unclear. Gutenberg seems to have resumed printing before 1460.

The record of this lawsuit, preserved at the Niedersächische Staats- und Universitäts Bibliothek Göttingen, is formally known as the The Helmasperger Notarial Instrument.

"Ulrich Helmasperger, clerk of the Bishopric of Bamberg, royal notary and certified public recorder at the Court of the Archbishop of Mainz wrote the Instrument which bears his name. This is the only contemporary account of the business relations between Gutenberg and Fust and of Gutenberg's invention, the "Work of the Books". This account of the legal proceedings documents that the citizen of Mainz, Johannes Fust, swore the following under oath: He had lent Gutenberg the sum of 1550 guilders which he himself had had to borrow at an interest rate of 6%. In his view the money he lent Gutenberg which was not used for their mutual benefit for the Work of the Books was a loan and thus he demanded that the interest on this loan be refunded to him. The Instrument briefly discusses the first legal complaint - the demand for repayment of the money - and describes the judgement which was unfavorable for Gutenberg. The Instrument does not mention the final judgement - Fust's demand that the partnership with Gutenberg be dissolved and the consequences of this" (http://www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/eframes/index.htm, accessed 01-17-2010).

♦ You can view a digital facsimile of the document, in whole, and in enlarged parts with transliterations and English translations, from the Niedersächische Staats- und Universitäts Bibliothek Göttingen website at this link: http://www.gutenbergdigital.de/gudi/eframes/index.htm, accessed 01-17-2010).

Needham, The Invention and Early Spread of European Printing as Represented in the Scheide Library (2007) 8.

Antonius Zarotus (Antonio Zaroto), "with the material of Pamfilo Castaldi," issued from Milan, Italy, Cosmographia, sive De situ orbis by the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela. ISTC No.: im00447000. 

Printer Zarotus worked as foreman for the Milanese prototypographer Pamfilo (Panfilo, Pamphilo) Castaldi in 1471, before entering into partnership with Gabriel de Ossonibus and others in May 1472. The surviving contract, published by Giuseppe Antonio Sassi in 1745 in his Historia literario-typographica Mediolanensis, is one of the most detailed records of such an arrangement so early in the printing business.

Pomponius Mela's text, of which this was the first printed edition, was the only surviving formal treatise on geography by a Roman author. It was widely copied and used during the Middle Ages. Nine printed editions appeared during the 15th century.

Printer Peter Schöffer of Mainz issued the first edition of the Codex Justinianus with the commentary of Franciscus Accursius. ISTC no. ij00574000. This is the first part of the Corpus Juris Civilis (Body of Civil Law) originally issued from Contantinople from 529 to 534 by the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I.

"Justinian's Corpus Juris Civilis was lost in the West, where it was scarcely needed in the primitive conditions that followed the collapse of Odoacer's sub-Roman kingdom. Historians disagree on the precise way it was recovered in Northern Italy about 1070: perhaps it was waiting unneeded and unnoticed in a library until the legal studies that were undertaken on behalf of papal authority that was central to the Gregorian Reform of Pope Gregory VII led to its accidental rediscovery. Aside from the Littera Florentina, a 6th-century codex of the Pandects that was jealously preserved at Pisa, since 1406 at Florence, there may have been other manuscript sources for the text that began to be taught at Bologna, by Pepo and then by Irnerius, whose technique was to read a passage aloud, which permitted his students to copy it, then to deliver an excursus explaining and illuminating Justinian's text, in the form of glosses. Irmerius' pupils, the "Four Doctors" were among the first of the "Glossators" who established the curriculum of Roman law."

"The merchant classes of Italian communes required law with a concept of equity and which covered situations inherent in urban life better than the primitive Germanic oral traditions. The provenance of the Code appealed to scholars who saw in the Holy Roman Empire a revival of venerable precedents from the classical heritage. The new class of lawyers staffed the bureaucracies that were beginning to be required by the princes of Europe. The University of Bologna, where Justinian's Code was first taught, remained the dominant center for the study of law through the High Middle Ages."

The Venetian Senate granted a privilege to the humanist Marco Antonio Sabellico for the printing of his Decades rerum Venetarum.

This document, preserved in the Venetian State Archives (ASV, NC, reg. 11, c.55r) was the first recorded privilege granted to an author, recognizing the right of Sabellico to authorize the publication of his work, and to secure protection against unauthorized printings. This has been called the first known author's copyright.

"Sabellico's privilege set the precedent for the custom of granting privileges not just to the printers but also directly to the authors. Such privileges are best understood as an extension of the traditional patronage system and as a form of reward rather than ownership. Sabellico's privilege was an exceptional arrangement in the sense that it was a form of reward for a literary work which promoted the public interest, rather than an assertion of the inherent rights of the author" (Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org, which also reproduces an image of the document, an English translation, and commentary).

Sabellico's work was first published in print in Venice the following year by Andreas Torresanus, de Asula. ISTC no. is00005000.

After their explusion from Spain David and Samuel ibn Nahmias travelled to Constantinople as a result of Sultan Bayezid II's offer of refuge. There they established the first Hebrew printing press in the Ottoman Empire. The first book the Nahmias brothers printed was Jacob ben Asher's fourteenth century Arbaah Turim (Four Orders of the Code of Law) completed on 4 Tevet 5254 (13 December 1493). This was the first book printed in the Ottoman Empire, not only in Hebrew but in any language.

Previously the Nahmias brothers had attempted to set up a printing shop in Naples. The type they used in Constantinople is similar to Hebrew type used in Spain and Italy. The paper on which their edition of ben Asher was printed in Constantinople is of northern Italian origin.

As Jews, the Nahmias brothers were allowed to practice the printing trade forbidden to Muslims. Jacob ben Asher's work was the only book that the Nahmias brothers issued in Hebrew from Constantinople during the 15th century.

Lehrstuhl für Türkische Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Universität Bamberg, The Beginnings of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims (2001) 9. ISTC no. ij00000300.

The Venetian Senate granted Ottaviano Petrucci a twenty-year patent for the double-impression technique of printing polyphonic music for voices, organ, and lute using moveable type.

This was the "first known record of a privilege granted for music printing. It is also one of the early records of patents for invention and improvement in the mechanism of printing, showing that there was no legal distinction between books and printed music or other works of art produced through the press" (Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org, reproducing an image of the document, and providing a translation and an extremely detailed, and thoroughly documented commentary).

Between 1514 and 1517 Gregorio de Gregorii, a Venetian, published from Fano, Italy, a Book of Hours entitled Kitab Salat al-Sawa'i, intended for distribution among the Christians of the Middle East, perhaps for export to the Melkite Christian communities of Syria. Commissioned by Pope Julius II, this was the first book printed in Arabic by movable type.

"The notes printed at the end of the work give us information about the printer, the location where it was printed and the year it was printed. The fact that the well-known Venetian printer, de Gergorij, had this book published not in Venice but in Fano may probably be explained by the fact that he wished to avoid the privileges that were in force in Venice relating to the printing of books in Oriental type. Only some of the at least ten surviving copies (for example the one housed in the Nuremberg Municipal Library) show a title page. It gives the Arabic title in red letters. Nine of the total of 240 pages of have noteworthy decorations in the form of edgings, which show a vareity of basic type faces, including three floral embellishments and flourth kind with a combination of birds and flower patterns" (Lehrstuhl für Türishche Sprache, Geschichte und Kultur, Universität Bamberg, The Beginnings of Printing in the Near and Middle East: Jews, Christians and Muslims [2001] no. 1).

Miroslav Krek, "The Enigma of the First Arabic Book Printed from Moveable Type," J. Near East. Stud., no. 3 (1979) 203-212. On 12-10-2008 I accessed a PDF of this article at http://www.ghazali.org/articles/jnes-38-3-mk.pdf.

In 1517 printer and publisher Alessandro Minuziano of Milan issued, with official permission of Pope Leo X, P. Cornelii Taciti libri quinque noviter inventi atque cum reliquis eius operibus editi. This was initially an unauthorized reprint or piracy of the first complete edition of the Annales, Historiae and other writings by the Roman historian Publius Cornelius Tacitus, edited, using a manuscript owned by Pope Leo X, by humanist and librarian of the Vatician, Filippo Beroaldo, the Younger. That edition had been first published in Rome by Stephanus Guilleretus de Lotheringia in 1515.

In 1508 Pope Leo X, formerly Cardinal Giovanni de' Medici, had the opportunity to purchase a manuscript of the "lost" first books of Tactitus's Annals.  The manuscript had been stolen from the monastery of Corvey in Westphalia, but that did not deter a passionate collector. On November 14, 1514 Leo granted Beroaldo the exclusive right or privilegio for printing the text. Violators of the privilegio were threatened with excommunication.  Beroaldo's edition was the first to include Books I-VI of the Annals, and also the first to include the "Annotationes" of the jurist and legal humanist Andrea Alciato (Alciati, Andreas Alciatus).

"According to the well-known story, the codex containing the six books by Tacitus (the so-called 'Mediceo primo" [Laurentianus Mediceus 68.1] had been stolen from the monastery of Corvey in Westphalia. In 1508 it was in the hands of Francesco Soderini from whom it was acquired by Cardinal Giovanini de' Medici (the future Leo X). In 1515, after becoming pope, Leo X granted Beroaldo the exclusive rights to the printing of the book. One of the printed books Leo sent to the Abbey of Corvey, together with a plenary indulgence, as a replacement for the 'borrowed' manuscript. Much to the annoyance of Leo X, the Milanese scholar and publisher Alessandro Minuziano ignored the  paper privilegio and reprinted Beroaldo's edition of Tacitus word-for-word. Minuziano was duly summoned to Rome to answer directly to the Pope. His detailed apology, however, appealed Leo X's anger and, with a papal letter of absolution, Minuziano was permitted to publish the work, provided he came to terms with Filippo Beroaldo" (Witcombe, Copyright in the Renaissance: Prints and the Privilegio in Sixteenth-Century Venice and Rome (2004) 48-49).

Landau and Parshall, The Renaissance Print 1470-1550 (1994) 301-02 point out that Minuziano attempted to skirt the privilegio in a clever way, which involved illegal cooperation with someone working in the printing office of Stephanus Guilleretus de Lotheringia in Rome: 

"In the meantime in Rome the issue of privileges had suddenly been brought to the attention of Leo X when it was discovered in 1515 that the Milanese publisher Alessandro Minuziano had found a loophole in the privilege granted to Filippo Beroaldo for his Storie. Minuziano did not copy the whole book once it had appeared, but page after page (obtained illegally) while it was being printed. The main reason the Pope was so exceeding angry was that he had paid the vast sum of 500 ducats for the manuscript. . . ."

Because he was copying the Rome edition as fast as it was being printed we may presume that Minuziano intended to issue his pirated edition almost simultaneously with the 1515 Rome edition. However his scheme was found out, and the dispute over the privilegio forced Minuziano to suspend publication until the matter was resolved. The matter was serious, especially as Leo X actively involved himself in issues of publication and censorship. Because the case was eventually resolved in Minuziano's favor he added an appendix to the edition containing the key documents pertaining to the case. These included the papal privilege of November 14, 1514, Minuziano's “supplication and prayers” to Leo X of March 30, 1516, defending himself, remarkably, by claiming ignorance of the Pope’s privilegio, pleading for absolution and to be allowed to finish his edition, and the papal letter of pardon dated September 7, 1516, reiterating Minuziano’s defense, and granting Minuziano permission to publish his edition.

Italian jurist Giovanni Nevizzano issued Inventarium librorum in utorque iure hactenus impressorum in Lyon. This small work of 38 pages was the first bibliography specifically restricted to works on the law. "It was also intended to aid lawyers in obtaining these books from the bookseller" (Breslauer & Folter, Bibliography: Its History and Development [1984] no. 11).

To check the spread of the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Queen Mary and King Philip granted a royal charter to the Worshipful Company of Stationers of London, thereby concentrating the entire printing business in the hands of the members of the Stationers Company.

"The Stationers' charter, establishing a monopoly on book production, ensured that once a member had asserted ownership of a text (or "copy") no other member would publish it. This is the origin of the term 'copyright'. Members asserted such ownership by entering it in the "entry book of copies" or the Stationers' Company Register."

The Stationers Company charter was confirmed two years later by Queen Elizabeth, but this time with the goal of suppressing Catholicism.

The Star Chamber issued a decree consolidating and amplifying the regulation of printing in England.

Galileo published from Venice at the press of Tomaso Baglioni Difesa di Galileo Galilei ... contro alle calumnie & imposture di Baldessar Capra. This booklet published the transcript of the trial resulting from the lawsuit that Galileo successfully brought against Baldessar Capra for copying the proportional and military compass that Galileo had invented. It was among the first, if not the very first, record of litigation over an invention, and most certainly the first litigation in the history of computing.

During the reign of Charles I, the English Star Chamber court that sat at the Palace of Westminster issued a decree on July 11, 1637, making it a general offense to print, import, or sell "any seditious, scismaticall, or offensive Bookes or Pamphlets." The decree was published as a pamphlet from London by Robert Barker, "Printer to the King's most Excellent Maiestie: And by the Assignes of John Bill, entitled A Decree of Starre-Chamber, Concerning Printing, Made the eleuenth day of July last past. 1637.

The decree also forbade anything to be printed which had not first been licensed and entered in the Stationers' Register, a record book maintained by the Stationers' Company of London. The company had been given a royal charter in 1557 to regulate the various professions associated with the publishing industry, including printers, bookbinders, booksellers, and publishers in England. The Register itself allowed publishers to document their right to produce a particular printed work, and constituted an early form of copyright law. The Company's charter gave it the right to seize illicit editions and bar the publication of unlicensed books. The decree also stated that nothing could be reprinted without being re-licensed.  

The decree further stated that in all cases the full signed imprimatur was to be printed; the names of the printer and the author were to be printed as well. The decree also limited the number of master printers to twenty, and specifyied the number of presses, journeymen, and apprentices each could have. The decree also made it an offense to work for an unlicensed printer, or to operate an unlicensed press. 

In 1884 The Grolier Club issued a deluxe limited edition reprint of this decree as their first publication, printed by the De Vinne Press, New York. Eric Holzenberg, Publications of the Grolier Club 1884-2009 IN: For Jean Grolier and His Friends, No. P1,

Abolition of the Star Chamber court removed the machinery of censorship in England. This resulted in an outpouring of publications on topics which previously had been suppressed. 2000 titles were published in England in 1642, and 3500 in 1643-- "more titles in a single year than at any time before the eighteenth century" (A. Hessayon, "Incendiary texts: book burning in England, c.1640 – c.1660", Cromohs, 12 [2007] 1-25. http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/12_2007/hessayon_incendtexts.html, accessed 01-04-2010).

Having abolished the Star Chamber court which had provided the mechanism for censorship in England, the British government attempted to re-establish censorship through a Licensing Order passed on this date which would require the licensing of publications before printing.

In response to the British Government's attempt to re-establish censorship through the Licensing Order passed in 1643, John Milton published in London Areopagitica: A Speech for the Liberty of Unlicense'd Printing, to the Parliament of England, arguing against the order for licensing books, and defending the freedom of the press.

"I deny not, but that it is of greatest concernment in the Church and Commonwealth, to have a vigilant eye how Bookes demean themselves, as well as men, and thereafter to confine, imprison, and do sharpest justice on them as malefactors: For Books are not absolutely dead things, but doe contain a potencie of life in them to be as active as that soule was whole progeny they are; nay they do preserve as in a violl the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. I know they are as lively, and as vigorously productive, as those fabulous Dragons teeth; and being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed men. Yet on the other hand, unlesse warinesse be us'd, as good almost kill a Man as kill a good Book; who kills a Man kills a reasonable creature, Gods Image; but hee who destroyes a good Booke, kills reason it selfe, kills the Image of God, as it were in the eye. Many a man lives a burden to the Earth, but a good Book is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a life beyond life" (Milton, Areopagitica).

In 1666 French forensic writing expert Jacques Raveneau published Traité des inscriptions en faux et reconnoissances d'escritures & signatures par comparison & autrement.  This work, issued in Paris, was the first book on the detection of forged documents.  Its distribution was suppressed because it was believed that information it contained was as useful to forgers as it was to those who attempted to detect forgeries.

Lecturer in law in Halle and Jena, Ahasaver Fritsch published in Jena Tractatus de typographis, bibliopolis chartariis et bibliopegis (Treatise on Book Printers, Booksellers, Paper Manufacturers and Bookbinders).  This treatise on the book trade focused on specifically on statutes, ordinances, liberties, disputes, censorship and inspection of printing offices and bookshops.

"Fritsch is one of the first writers on the subject to explicitly define an author's exclusive right to permit new editions of his work. The first publisher, however, has a right of priority to the publication of the new edition, provided that he offers the author terms which are as good as those promised by competing publishers (p.47). In Fritsch's view, however, the author's right is not meant to produce profit, but only honour. Quoting the Jena law professor Johannes Gryphiander (1580-1652), he states on page 37f.: 'The works of authors are sold to book printers and book sellers for a certain price, but in such a way, though, that the latter have the profit, whereas the honour goes to the former.' Fritsch' s views on authors' rights to new editions and his notion that the author may expect to gain honour but not profit, are probably based on his own experiences and hopes as an author and lecturer. However, when he presents a detailed justification of book privileges, Fritsch proves himself to be a judicious political theorist: privileges do not fall into the general category of monopolies which are to be rejected. He gives three reasons for arguing thus: (i) the demands of natural justness ('natürliche Billigkeit'), whereby the first publishers have to be protected, so that they may recoup their investment; (ii) publishers are encouraged ('angefrischet') by the award of privileges to have valuable new books printed at their expense; (iii) privileges are granted only for a limited term, so that they cannot seriously harm the public in any way. These three aspects sound quite modern: a special protection is justified on the grounds of the natural right not to suffer unjust damages and to recoup what one has invested. Furthermore, such special protection is justified as the means of providing an incentive for further publishing ventures. Nevertheless, such exemptions from the general rejection of monopolies are only to be allowed for a strictly limited term" (Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org, referring to the anonymous German translation of 1750).

In his book on medieval documents, De re diplomatica libri sex, published in Paris in 1681 Benedictine monk Jean Mabillon founded the formal study of palaeography and diplomatics, laying down the principles for dating scripts and ornament in manuscripts.  At this time the term palaeography did not exist. It was later coined by Mabillon's pupil Bernard de Montfaucon, who in his Palaeographia Graeca (1708) applied similar principles to the dating of Greek manuscripts.  

Initially paleography developed to resolve legal disputes over documents. During the Middle Ages, the production of spurious charters and other false documents was common, either to provide written documentation of existing rights or to bolster the plausibility of claimed rights. These spurious documents were later employed to bolster claims that were fraudulent. In 1675 the Jesuit Daniel van Papenbroeck (Papebroch) proved that a charter guaranteeing certain privileges to the Benedictines, supposedly issued by the Merovingian king Dagobert in 646, was a forgery.

"The French Benedictine order, which had recently been revived under the title of the Congregation of Saint Maur and was devoting itself to various scholarly enterprises, treated van Papenbroeck's work as a challenge. One of its most able members, Dom Jean Mabillon (1632-1707), spent several years in studying charters and manuscripts, drawing up in a systematic way for the first time a series of criteria for testing the authenticity of medieval documents. The result was De re diplomatica (1681), to which we owe the word diplomatic, normally used as the technical term for the study of legal and official documents. Mabillon's work dealt also to a lesser extent with manuscripts, but was resticted to Latin. It was immediately recognized as a masterpiece, even by van Papenbroeck, who had a cordial exchange of letters with Mabillon, acknowledging that his attempt to prove the spuriousness of all Merovingian charters was an excess of skepticism. On the other hand his thesis about the charter of 646 was upheld" (Reynolds & Wilson, Scribes and Scholars 3rd ed [1991] 189).

Boyle, Medieval Latin Palaeography: A Bibliographical Introduction (1983) No. 72.  Carter & Muir, Printing and the Mind of Man (1967) No. 158.

In 1697 German historian of law Heinrich Günther von Thülemeyer published from Frankfurt Copia manuscript aurea bullae Caroli IV Rom. Imp. quo in Austiissmia Bibliotheca Caesarea Vindobonensi invenitur, atque annot Christ. 1400 . . . .  This large folio publication was a page-for-page reproduction of an illuminated medieval manuscript of Die Goldene Bulle commissioned by King Wenceslas IV of Bohemia, and produced in 1400. The manuscript was preserved  in Vienna (Codex Vindobonensis 338).

Significant for book history, Thülemeyer's edition followed the large format of the medieval manuscript exactly, reproducing the two-column calligraphic text of all 46 leaves in type, and the numerous color images in black and white copperplate engravings, very close to their appearance in the original. Thülemeyer followed his facsimile with a commentary. This was the first full facsimile of a manuscript ever printed. It was not an exact facsimile since the images were not in color and the printed pages did not include all the marginal ornamentation present in the manuscript.

In 1977 publisher Akademische Druck in Graz, Austria published a full-size folio facsimile of Thülemeyer's 1697 facsimile, reproducing twenty pages of the original illuminated manuscript in color facing corresponding pages in the black and white facsimile showing the correspondence between the original manuscript and the 1697 edition. The 1977 edition, itself a minor landmark in the history of books as "the first facsimile of the first facsimile," was edited by Armin Wolf. Unlike most of Akademische Druck's facsimiles, which were expensive limited editions, the 1977 work was issued as a trade publication, and presumably a relatively large printing, at a reasonable price.

English surgeon and anatomist William Cowper published The Anatomy of Humane Bodies. . . . This large folio volume included a mezzotint portrait of Cowper by Smith after Closterman, an allegorical engraved title attributed to Abraham Bloteling with pasted-on English title in cartouche, a second engraved title with vignette by Sturt, and 114 plates, of which 105 were designed by Gérard de Lairesse and probably engraved by Bloteling, and 9 plates mostly drawn and engraved by Michael van der Gucht. The volume was printed in Oxford at the Sheldonian Theatre and issued in London by Samuel Smith & Benjamin Walford.  From the format standpoint it is one of the largest volumes published in England during the seventeenth century.

Cowper's atlas was the first edition in English of the original anatomical plates designed for Govert Bidloo by Gérard de Lairesse, a painter who rivaled Rembrandt in popularity in his time. The plates were originally issued with Bidloo's Latin text and published in 1685. There was also an edition in Dutch in 1690. Bidloo’s text, however, was widely criticized, and perhaps because of this, or because sales were disappointing, Cowper, or his publisher, was able to obtain 300 sets of Bidloo's original plates from the publishers in Amsterdam. Cowper arranged to supply an entirely new text in English to accompany the reissue of the original engravings, with a few additions. Cowper also commissioned nine new plates. Cowper's new English text was clearly superior, and the basis for later Latin editions. However, Cowper did not acknowledge Bidloo, even going so far as to paste over Bidloo’s name with his own in the cartouche on the engraved allegorical title.

At this time neither copyright nor rights of authorship existed. The first copyright law passed was the British Statute of Anne in 1709. Without legal recourse, Bidloo chose to attack Cowper in print, resulting in a bitter plagiarism dispute between the two— one of the most famous in medical history. In 1700 Bidloo went so far as to publish his Gulielmus Cowper, criminalis literari citatus, coram tribunali, attacking Cowper in considerable detail. 

Russell, British Anatomy, no. 211.

In 1709 British parliament enacted the Statute of Anne; short title: Copyright Act 1709 8 Anne c.21; long title: An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned. 

Named after Anne, Queen of Great Britain, this was the first copyright statute in the Kingdom of Great Britain, and the first full-fledged copyright statute in the world. It was enacted in the regnal year 1709 to 1710 and entered into force on April 10, 1710.  

The Statute of Anne granted publishers of books legal protection for 14 years with the commencement of the statute. It also granted 21 years of protection for any book already in print. At the expiration of the first 14 year copyright term the copyright re-vested in its author, if he or she were still alive, for a further term of 14 years.

"The statute determined that the 'copy' was the 'sole liberty of printing and reprinting' a book and this liberty could be infringed by any person who printed, reprinted or imported the book without consent. Those infringing copyright had to pay a fine of one penny for every sheet of the book, one moiety of which went to the author, the other to the Crown. In today’s terms this was a considerable fine. In addition the book in question was to be destroyed. Leaving in place the existing system of registration, the statute specified that action against infringement could only be brought if the title had been entered in the register at the Stationers' Company before publication. The formal requirements of registration enabled users to locate the owners of copyrighted works. The requirement for copies of published books to be deposited in university libraries ensured that there was public access to copyrighted works.

"Authors' rights

"The statute was the first to recognise the legal right of authorship, but it did not provide a coherent understanding of authorship or authors' rights. While the statute established the author as legal owner, and so providing the basis for the development of authors' copyright, it also provided a 21 year copyright term to books already in print. At the end of the 21 years granted by the statute the concept of literary property was still a booksellers' rather than an author' concern, as most authors continued to sell their works outright to booksellers. Given that the statute primarily intended to encourage public learning and to regulate the book trade, any benefits for authors in the statute were incidental. Throughout the 18th century, at the encouragement of the booksellers, rather than the authors, an understanding emerged that copyright originated in author's rights to the product of his labour. Thus it was argued that the primary purpose of copyright was to protect authors' rights, not the policy goal of encouraging public learning" (Wikipedia article on Statute of Anne, accessed 08-06-2011).

By the terms of the Patto di famiglia, Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, Electress Palatine and last of the political, banking and royal House of Medici, bequeathed the Medici art collections, assembled since the 16th century, including the contents of the Uffizi, Palazzo Pitti and the Medici villas, and her Palatine treasures, to the Tuscan state, on the condition that no part of it could be removed from "the Capital of the grand ducal [sic] State....[and from] the succession of His Serene Grand Duke."

"Anna Maria Luisa's single most enduring act was the Family Pact. It ensured that all the Medicean art and treasures collected over nearly three centuries of political ascendancy remained in Florence. Cynthia Miller Lawrence, an American art-historian, argues that Anna Maria Luisa thus provisioned for Tuscany's future economy through tourism. Sixteen years after her death, the Uffizi Gallery, built by Cosimo the Great, the founder of the Grand Duchy, was made open to public viewing" (Wikipedia article on Anna Maria Luisa de' Medici, accessed 09-29-2010).

King George II donated the 'Old Royal Library' of the sovereigns of England to the British Museum. With that gift the British Museum obtained the privilege of acquiring books by copyright receipt.

Drafted on November 15, 1777, The Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union established the United States of America as a confederation of 13 founding states, and served as its first constitution. Its drafting by the Continental Congress began in mid 1776, and an approved version was sent to the states for ratification in late 1777. Once approved, the Articles were printed by Francis Bailey in Lancaster, Pennsylvania in a very small edition intended for distribution to state governors who were to submit them to their legislatures and local press in anticipation of the state-by-state ratification process. This process had to be unanimous.

"On March 1, 1781, Maryland became the thirteenth state to ratify, having held out until the larger states with western boundaries that extended as far as the Mississippi had ceded their lands northwest of the Ohio River to the common government. Under the Articles, the new nation was organized as a federal union of independent states with authority vested in a single body, the Congress of Confederation. There was no Executive Branch and no provision for a federal Judiciary except for certain cases of court-martial. Congress had only those powers, and they were few, specifically granted to them by the states as common concerns. These chiefly related to military and foreign diplomatic initiatives required in the face of war with Great Britain.

"The weakness of this confederation became increasingly apparent when the War for Independence was over and the staggering debt repayment, which Congress under the Articles could proportionally assess but not directly collect, became a point of conflict between the states and a source of intense domestic strife within several of the states" (http://chapin.williams.edu/exhibits/founding.html#articles, accessed 04-22-2012).

The original edition of the Articles of Confederation has been called "the most sumptuously printed major American document of the 18th century." In 2012 nine copies were recorded.

In 1739 Scottish Goldsmith William Ged printed a 12mo edition of Sallust, which was probably the first book to announce on its title page that it had been printed from stereotype plates rather than moveable type.  Ged did not, however, attempt to patent the process. In 1784 Andrew Foulis, Printer to the University of Glasgow, and Alexander Tilloch, a printer in Glasgow, were awarded British patent No. 1431 for "A Method of Making Plates for the Purpose of Printing by or with Plates instead of the Moveable Types commonly used, and for Vending and Disposing of the said Printing Plates and the Books or other Publications therewith Printed, whereby a much greater degree of Accuracy, Correctness, and Elegance will be introduced in the publication of the Works both of the Ancient and Modern Authors than had hiterto been attained." Their process Tilloch claimed to have invented in 1781 without knowledge of Ged's prior work.

In their brief specification Foulis and Tilloch stated that their "method of making plates for the purpose of printing by or with such plates, instead of the moveable types commonly used, which is performed by making a plate or plates for their page or pages of any book or other publication, and in printing off such book or other publication at the press; the plates of the pages to be arranged in their proper order, and the number of copies wanted thrown off, instead of throwing the impressions wanted from moveable types locked together in the common method; and such plates are made either by forming moulds or matrices for the page or pages of the books or other publications to be printed by or with plates, and filling such moulds or matrices with metal or with clay, or with a mixture of clay and earth, or by stamping or striking with these moulds or matrices the metal, clay, earth or mixture of clay and earth."

The Constitution of the United States was created on September 17, 1787 and ratified by conventions in 11 states by June 21, 1788. During the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia two drafts of the federal Constitution were printed, each in editions of sixty copies, for discussion by the delegates. The first draft was prepared by the Committee of Detail, and when that was revised, a second draft was prepared by the Committee of Style and Arrangement.  The final version was printed in 1789 by Francis Childs and John Swaine, Printers to the United States, as Acts Passed at a Congress of the United States of America, begun and Held at the City of New-York on Wednesday the Fourth of March in the Year M,DCC,LXXXIX, and of the Independence of the United States, the Thirteenth.

The original manuscript of the Constitution is preserved by the National Archives, Washington, D.C., where it is on public display.

The Bill of Rights, the collective name for the first ten amendments to the Constitution of the United States, were introduced by James Madison to the 1st United States Congress as a series of legislative articles, and were adopted by the House of Representatives on August 21, 1789.  By joint resolution of Congress they were formally proposed on September 25, 1789, and were ratified by three-fourths of the states on December 15, 1791. 

Once passed in the House of Representatives, the Bill of Rights, along with other legislation passed was printed by Francis Childs and John Swaine, Printers to the United States, in New York, and sent to the Senate for consideration as Acts passed at a Congress of the United States of America, begun and held at the City of New-York on Wednesday the Fourth of March in the Year, M,DCC,LXXXIX and of the Independence of the United States, the Thirteenth. This publication also included a version of the United States Constitution. The first edition was in folio format; a smaller octavo reprint also appeared in 1789. In the folio version owned by George Washington and preserved in the Chapin Library of Williams College: 

"there are seventeen articles, parts of which are of particular interest in comparison to the final text: for example, the original third article provided not only that 'Congress shall make no law establishing religion or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' but also that 'the rights of Conscience [shall not] be infringed'; while the original fifth article, establishing “the right of the People to keep and bear arms' in relation to 'a well regulated militia,' also provided that 'no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms, shall be compelled to render military service in person.'

"The Senate in its deliberations deleted some of the articles written by the House, and combined others. Their preferred text then went to a House-Senate committee, and finally twelve articles, shown in the Chapin Library in a copy of the first printed Acts of Congress, were sent to the states for ratification. The states failed to ratify the first and second articles, which, respectively, concerned the proportion of representation in Congress and the method by which congressional salaries could be changed. Articles three through twelve as approved by Congress became, therefore, in the final ratified Bill of Rights, articles one through ten. (The original second article, concerning congressional salaries, in fact was never officially taken off the table, and was eventually ratified as the 27th Amendment in May 1992) (http://chapin.williams.edu/exhibits/founding.html#rights, accessed 04-22-2012).

The original manuscript of the Bill of Rights is preserved in the National Archives, Washington, D.C., where it is on public display.

♦ On June 22, 2012 Christie's in New York offered for sale at auction George Washington's annotated copy of the 1789 folio edition of the U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights.  The auction catalogue mentioned that Washington owned three copies of the folio edition and three copies of the octavo version.  One of the three was the copy owned by Williams College mentioned above.  The other two, including the copy being auctioned, remained in private hands. The pre-sale estimate was $2,000,000-$3,000,000. The book sold for $9,826,500. million. This set a new high price record for an American book or document. The book was purchased by the non-profit Mount Vernon Ladies Association of the Union, which maintains the historic Mount Vernon estate in Virginia that was Washington's home, and is now open to the public.

In 1790 London chemist,  chemist, translator, journalist, publisher, scientist, and inventor William Nicholson received British patent No. 1748 for "A Machine or Instrument on a New Construction for the Purpose of Printing on Paper, Linen, Cotton Woolen and other Articles in a more Neat, Cheap, and Accurate Manner than is effected by the Machines now in use." In this patent Nicholson made sketchy but prophetic proposals for printing with cylinders which it is believed he never carried out.

"Nicolson's patent consisted of three parts. The first was for casting types in a multi-letter mould, so that 'two, three or more letters' could be cast at one pouring of the metal, but the resulting types were to be scraped into a shape so that they could be inserted around a cylinder. The second part called for cylinders covered with leather or cloth to distribute the ink. The third demanded that all printing was to be performed by passing paper or material to be printed between two cylinders, one of which 'has the block form, plate assemblance of types, or original, attached to or forming part of its surface' " (Moran, Printing Presses, History and Development from the Fifteenth century to Modern Times [1973] 102).

Nicholson's specification contains several drawings.

"In the first drawing, which as the outline of a hand-press A is the impression cylinder in gear with and driving the carriage HI to and fro. B is the inking cylinder,w ith distributing rollers; these take their ink supply from the 'ink block' (duct) at O as this advances with the carriage.

"In the second drawing, which shows three cylinders vertically arranged, B is an inking cylinder with distributors andan ink duct; A is a cylinder 'having the letter imposed upon it surface'; E is the impression cylinder" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue fo the Exhibitions at The British Museum and at Earls Court, London 16-27 July 1963 [1963] No. 402).

Mechanization of printing through a steam-powered cylinder press was accomplished by Friedrich Koenig between 1810 and 1816. The Oxford Dictionary of National Bibliography states that "Nicholson was subsequently consulted by Friedrich König, the inventor of a machine for the same purpose constructed on different principles, but never asserted a prior claim."

On April 10, 1790 President George Washington signed the Patent Act of 1790 into law, founding the United States patent system. 

Three months later, on July 31, 1790 Samuel Hopkins of Philadelphia, received the first U.S. patent for an improvement in "the making of Pot ash and Pearl ash by a new Apparatus and Process." President George Washington signed the patent, as did Attorney General Edmund Randolph and Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson. The original document is preserved in the Chicago History Museum.

In 1798 French soldier and mechanical engineer Louis-Nicolas Robert invented the first papermaking machine.

After completing his military career, in 1790 Robert became an indentured clerk at one of the Didot family's Paris publishing houses. First working under Saint-Léger Didot as a clerk, he later switched to a position as "inspector of personnel" at Pierre-François Didot's hand paper-making factory in Corbeil-Essonnes in the suberbs of Paris. This establishment had a history dating back to 1355, and supplied paper to the Ministry of Finance for currency manufacture. Both Robert and Didot grew impatient with the quarrelling workers, vatmen, couchers, and laymen, so Robert was motivated to find a way to mechanize the labor-intensive process of making paper by hand. 

Prior to 1798, paper was made one sheet at a time, by dipping a rectangular frame or mould with a screen bottom into a vat of pulp. The frame was removed from the vat, and the water was pressed out of the pulp. The remaining pulp was allowed to dry; the frame could not be re-used until the previous sheet of paper was removed from it. Robert's construction had a moving screen belt that would receive a continuous flow of stock and deliver an unbroken sheet of wet paper to a pair of squeeze rolls. As the continuous strip of wet paper came off the machine it was manually hung over a series of cables or bars to dry. This continuous, unbroken sheet of paper later had to be cut. An advantage of making continous sheets was that it the large sheets could be printed for wallpaper.

Robert applied for a French patent for his machine on September 9, 1798; it was granted in 1799.  However, because of disagreements between Robert and his partners, St. Leger and François Didot, and also because of financial disruptions caused by the French Revolution, François Didot attempted to have it developed in England, sending his English brother-in-law, John Gamble, to London to develop the technology.

In 1801 John Gamble, of Leicester Square, Middlesex County (now London), received British patent No. 2487 for an "Invention of Making Paper in single Sheets, without Seam or Joining, from One to Twelve Feet and upwards Wide, and from One to Forty-five Feet and upwards in Length." Gamble's specification was essentially a translation of Robert's patent. The title of the specification, with its emphasis on the production of very large sheets, indicates that the original market for the product was expected to be wallpaper.  Earlier that year Gamble returned to France to obtain drawings of the machine for the patent specification.  He also arranged to have Robert's working model of the machine sent to England so that improvements could be made.

In 1976 Janet Fourdinier sold Robert's original drawings of his papermaking machine at auction. These were acquired by collector and papermaking historian Leonard Schlosser.  After Schlosser's death the drawings were reproduced in color in their original size and published by Henry Morris of the Bird & Bull Press with an explanatory introduction in Nicolas Louis Robert and his Endless Wire Pamaking Machine with Facsimiles of the Inventor's Original Drawings of the first Paper Machine, Including a chapter on the papermaking historian Leonard B. Schosser (2000).

Clapperton, The Paper-making Machine. Its Invention, Evolution and Development (1967) 15-33.

On April 28, 1800 English papermaker Matthias Koops was granted English patent no. 2392 for Extracting Ink from Paper and Converting such Paper into Pulp. Within the patent Koops described his process as "An invention made by me of extracting printing and writing ink from printed and written paper, and converting the paper from which the ink is extracted into pulp, and making thereof paper fit for writing, printing, and other purposes."

This was the first patented process for recycling paper, and it is also possibly the first patent received for a recycling process that was— much later— widely used.

Koops's patent was first published in print in London in 1856. Prior to this time English patents were recorded only on the Patent Rolls and were not published in print until the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852 proposed that an Office of the Commissioners of Patents be set up. Under its first Superintendent of Specifications, Bennet Woodcroft,  the Office published newly deposited specifications, and also all earlier patents beginning in 1617. 

Hunter, The Literature of Papermaking 1390-1800 (1925) 48. Hunter, Papermaking: The History and Technique of an Ancient Craft (1947) 333; see also 332-35.

On June 20, 1801 German actor, playwright, and inventor Alois Senefelder received British patent no. 2518 for "A New Method and Process of performing the Various Branches of the Art of Printing on Paper, Linen, Cotton, Woollen and other Articles." This patent, with 18 pages of text and 9 figures on a large folding plate, represented Senefelder's earliest technical description of the process of lithography. 

It may be worthy of note that Senefelder foresaw the wide range of applications of his process beyond strictly printing on paper.

Senefelder's patent was first printed in 1856. Prior to this time English patents were recorded only on the Patent Rolls and were not published in print until the Patent Law Amendment Act of 1852 proposed that an Office of the Commissioners of Patents be set up. Under its first Superintendent of Specifications, Bennet Woodcroft, the Office published newly deposited specifications, and also all earlier patents beginning in 1617.

Twyman, Lithography 1800-1850 (1970) 26-27, 257.

In July 1809 English inventor John Dickinson of Aspley, Hertfordshire, patented the cylinder-mould papermaking machine, receiving British patent No. 3191 for "Certain Improvements on my former Patent Machinery for Cutting and Placing Ppaer, and also certain Machinery for the Manufacture of Paper by a new Method." Dickinson's concept was the first to allow for commercially viable machine production of paper, and of the early inventors in papermaking, Dickinson was the only man in England to a develop a business that remained financially successful for generations.

Dickinson's "process consisted of a perforated cylinder of metal, with a closely fitting cover of finely woven wire, which revolved in a vat of wood pulp. The water from the vat was carried off through the axis of the cylinder, leaving the fibres of the wood pulp clinging to the surface of the wire. An endless web of felt passed through what was known as a 'couching roller' lying upon the cylinder drew off the layer of pulp which when dried became paper" (Wikipedia article on John Dickinson, accessed 05-19-2012).

Clapperton, The Paper-making Machine. Its Invention, Evolution and Development (1967) 54-77.

Workers and craftsmen concerned about the loss of jobs due to mechanization in the workplace as a result of the Industrial Revolution founded the Luddite movement. 

"Towards the close of the year 1811, a spirit of riot and insubordination manifested itself in the country of Nottingham, which, in the course of that year, extended to the counties of Derbyshire, Leicestershire, Lancashire, Cheshire, and Yorkshire, and in some degree, pervaded all the manufacturing districts of England. The insurgents, who assumed the name of 'LUDDITES,' probably with a view of inspiring their adherents with confidence, the malcontents gave out that they were under the command of one leader, whom they designated by the factitious name of Ned Ludd, or General Ludd, calling themselves Ludds, Ludders, or Luddites. There is no reason, however to believe that there was in truth any one leader. In each district where the disaffection prevailed, the most aspiring man assumed the local superiority, and became the General Ludd of his own district.

"The avowed and immediate object of the Luddites was the destruction of certain articles of machinery, the use of which had superseded or diminished manual labour, in the manufacture of the articles to which they were applied. These disturbances, which had now attracted the attention of parliament, and excited apprehensions of the most alarming nature, first manifested themselves by the destruction of a great number of newly-erected stocking-frames, by small parties of men, principally stocking-weavers, who assembled in various places round the town of Nottingham. The men engaged in the disturbances were at first principally those thrown out of employment by the use of the new machinery, or by their refusal to work at the rate of wages offered by the manufacturers, and they particularly sought the destruction of frames owned those hosiers, or worked by those men who were willing to work at the lower rates. In consequence of the resistance opposed to the outrages of the rioters, in the course of which one of their number was shot, on the 11th of November, at Bullwell, magistrates found it necessary to call in the assistance of a considerable armed force, which was promptly assembled, consisting, at first, principally of local militia and volunteer yeomanry, to whom were added about four hundred special constables. The terror of this force seemed for a time to allay the spirit of insurbordination; but before the end of the month of November, the outrages were renewed, and assumed a more serious systematic character. In several villages, the rioters not only destroyed the frames, but they levied contributions for subsistence, which rapidly increased their number, and enlarged their sphere of action.

"A considerable regular military force was now went to Nottingham, and in January 1812, two of the most experienced police magistrates were dispatatched from London to that place for the purpose of assisting the local authorities in their endeavours to restore tranquillity in the disturbed districts. The systematic combination with which the outrages were conducted, the terror which they inspired, and the disposition of many of the lower orders to favour, rather than to oppose them, made it very difficult  to discover the offenders, or to obtain evidence to convict those who were apprehended. Some, however, were afterwards proceeded against at the spring assizes of 1812, at Nottingham, and seven persons, convicted of different offences connected with the riots, were sentenced to transportation. In the meantime, acts were passed by the legistature for establishing a police in the disturbed districts, upon the ancient system of watch and war, and for making the destruction of stocking-frames a capital crime, punishable by death.

"Early in the year, the spirit of riot and distrubance spread itself into Cheshire and Lancashire; at Tentwistle, in the former county, the cotton machinery in Mr. Rhodes's mill was totally destroyed; and at Stockport, the house of Mr. Goodwin was set on fire on the 14th of April, and his steam-looms destroyed. On the 20th of the same month, the manufactory of Messrs. Daniel Burton and Sons, situated at Middleton, six miles from Manchester, was attached by a mob, consisting of several thousand persons, and although the rioters were repulsed, and four of their number killed by the military force assembled to protect the works, a second attack was made on the following day, when Mr. Emanuel Burton's dewelling-house was set on fire, and destroyed. About the same time riots took place in Manchester, of which the alleged cause was the high price of provisions. At West Houghton, near Bulton-le-moors, the rioters taking advantage of the absence of the military, assailed the large manufactur of Messrs. Wroe and Duncuft, and after having forced the doors, and set fire to the mill and machinery, dispersed before the soldiers could be assembled

"Symptoms of the same lawless disposition appeared at Newcastle-under-line, Wigan, Warrington, and Eccles; and the contagion had spread to Carlisle, and into Yorkshire. In Nottinghamshire, the machinery obnoxious to the rioters was wide weaving frames; in Lancashire, looms wrought by steam; and in Yorkshire, gig-mills, or machinery used in the shearing of woollen cloth—all inventions of modern date, and each of them calculated to supersede or diminish the demand for manual labour. . . .

"The causes alleged for these alarming proceedings were generally the want of employment for the working manufacturers—a want, however, which was the least felt in some of the places where the disorders were the most prevalent; another of the alleged causes was the application of machinery to supply the place of labour; and a third, the high price of provisions. An opinion also prevailed at the time, that the views of some of the persons engaged in these excesses extended to revolutionary measures, and contemplated the overthrow of the government; but his opinion seems to have been supported by no satisfactory evidence; and it is admited on all hands, that the leaders of the riots, although possessed of considerable influence, were all of the labouring classes.

"That societies existed for forwarding the objects of the disaffected was clearly manifest, all which societies were directed by a secret committee, which might be considered as the great mover of the whole machine; and it was established by the various information received from different parts of the country, that these societies were governened by their respective secret committees; that delegates and messengers were continually dispatched from place to place for the purpose of concerting plans and conveying information; * [*"A small weekly contribution paid by every member of these combinations formed a fund, by which the delegates and messengers were wholly or in part supported, according to the nature and extent of their services. This fund there is reason to suppose was also applied to the support of the imprisoned Luddites; and its application in this way, combined with the nature of the oath, may in some degree account for the paucity of information collected from them while in prison, and even in the prospect of death. In fact, the made no disclosures. All their secrets, whether they related to the organization of their societies, the names of their leaders, or their depots of arms, died with them."] that an illegal oath of the most atrocious kind was extensively administered;* [*"Several copies of the oath were discovered, but the following appears to be the correct version: OATH. 'I. A. B., of my own voluntary will, do declare, and solemnly swear, that I never will reveal to any person or persons under the canopy of heaven, the names of the persons, who compose this secret committee, their proceedings, meetings, places of abode, dress, features, complexion, or anything else that might lead to a discovery of the same, either by word, deed, or sign, under the penalty of being sent out of the world by the first brother who shall meet me, and my name and character blotted out of existence, and never to be remembered but with contempt and abhorrence; and I further now do swear, that I will use my best endeavours to punish by death any traitor or traitors, should any rise up among us, wherever I can find him or them, and though he should fly to the verge of nature, I will pursue him with unceasing vengeance. So help me God, and bless me to keep this my oath inviolable."] that secret signs were arranged, by which the persons engaged these conspiracies were known to each other. The military organization, carried on by persons enaged in these societies, had also prceeded to an alarming length; in some parts of the country they assembled in large numbers, chiefly by night; upon heaths or commons, taking the usual precaution of paroles and counter-signs. The muster-rolls were called over by numbers, not names; they were directed by leaders, sometimes in disguise; they placed sentries to give alarm at the approach of any person, whom they might suspect of an intention to interrupt or give information opf their proceedings; and they dispersed instantly at the firing of a gun or other signal agreed upon, and so dispersed to avoid detection . . . . (An Historical Account of the Luddites of 1811, 1812, and 1813, with Report of their Trials at York Castle, from the 2nd to the 12th of January, 1813, before Sir Alexander Thompson and Sir Simon le Blanc, Knights, Judges of the Special Commission [1862] 7-12).

In January 1813 64 persons were tried for crimes tied to the Luddite movement; 14 were executed.  The proceedings of the trial were published as Report of Proceedings under Commissions of Oyer & Terminer and Gaol Delivery for County of York, Held at the Castle of York, before Sir Alexander Thomson, Knight and Sir Simon Le Blanc, Knight, from the 2nd to the 12th January 1813.  From the shorthand notes of Mr. Gurney. To which are subjoined Two Proclamations, Issued in consequence of the Result of those Proceedings. Though this edition is undated, because of the sensational nature of the trial, the presumption is that it would have been published during 1813.

In 1813 George E. Clymer, mechanic and inventor of Philadelphia, invented the Columbian Press.  Inspired to some extent by the Stanhope Press, the Columbian Press was designed to allow a whole newspaper page to be printed in a single pull. The press worked by a lever system, similar to that of the Stanhope press. Because Clymer found a limited market for his press in America, in 1817 he moved to England to compete with the Stanhope Press. In 1817 Clymer received British patent No. 4174 for "Certain Improvements in Printing Presses." His specification described and illustrated the Columbian Press.

Reflecting the slow transition from handpress to mechanized printing in many aspects of the printing trades, Clymer's Columbian Press was manufactured and sold for over a century.  Some historians consider it the first great American contribution to printing technology.

In 1813 engineer Bryan Donkin of Bermondsey, Surrey, and printer (later: Whig journalist, musician, and miscellaneous writer) Richard Mackenzie Bacon of Norwich received British patent No. 3757 for "Certain Improvements in the Implements or Apparatus Emplying in Printing, whether from Types, from Blocks, or from Plates." 

"The first [rotary press] to be built, that of Richard Bacon and Bryan Donkin, patented in 1813, was fed by sheets of paper and avoided the problem of fitting type to cylindrical surfaces. The type was still held in flat formes, which were fixed on four sides of a prism, which was square in section. Its axis revolved by the action of a winch, and the type was printed on to the paper by means of a second roller, called by the old name of the platen, its surface being made up of four segments of cylinders, and its circumference when turned round always applying to a type surface. Ink was applied by a large composition cylinder above the prism, which received  ink from a distribution roller supplied from a third metal roller. Bacon and Donkin were thus pioneers in the use of the composition roller and the ink duct. The whole mechanism was quite small, capable standing upon an ordinary writing-table, but it was very complicated and required great accuracy of operation. An exhibition was held in Donkin's factory, and claims were made that the machine would perform the work of eight hand presses. Hansard states that he showed the inventor that work on six of his presses would have required four of the new machines to execute it. The only one of Bacon and Donkin's machines known to Hansard was installed at the University Press, Cambridge, where (in 1825) it 'rests in peace, as not being found in any degree useful" (Moran, Printing Presses. History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times [1973] 175-76).

Frederick Koenig's last English patent, No. 3868, "Certain further improvements on my method of printing by means of machinery," was the basis of an improved cylinder machine and of a perfecting machine— one which would print on both sides of a sheet of paper.

"The perfecting machine was a combination of two in one, in which the forme, printing cylinder and inking device were duplicated but which had a single feeding apparatus in the shape of an endless web on which the sheet of paper was fed. A registering apparatus was fixed between the two printing cylinders, which were covered only partially to the size of a sheet so that the forme could return freely under the uncovered portion. The paper was carried between two rows of tapes round the first cylinder, to be printed on one side, and was then taken off the cylinder, laid on the register device, which sustained it until it arrived in a vertical position over the second cylinder, to be moved around it and printed on the second side. The sheet was turned by the use of an S-shaped course, and after being printed on both sides was conducted to a board in the middle of the machine. The first machine of this sort was finished in Febuary 1816, and was installed in Bensley's office, where, steam-driven, it was used for book printing. It produced 900 to 1,000 perfected sheets an hour. The second edition of Dr. J. Elliotson's translation of Blumenbach's Institutions of Physiology was, in consequence, the first complete book to be printed by a machine" (Moran, Printing Presses, History and Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times [1973] 109-110).

In 1816 printing engineer Edward Cowper of London received British patent No. 3974 for "A Method of Printing Paper for Paper Hanging, and other Purposes."  

"Cowper . . .  recognized, like Nicholson, the advantages of a curved printing surface mounted on a  continously revolving cylinder. The difficulty was to provide this surface. Cowper, who would have been aware of the Bacon and Donkin project, must have realized that single types, however shaped or arranged, had very serious disadvantages, and that the solid stereotype plate offered much better prospects of success if they could be curved.

"The only method of casting stereotypes known at that time was the plaster process, which produced a flat plate. Cowper's patent described how these plates were to be heated and then passed between two rollers to curve them. There was, of course, the risk of breaking the plates during the operation, but the method worked; it was used for printing £1 notes at the Bank of England, where these machines were installed for the purpose" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions and the British Museum and Earl's Court  16-27 July 1963 [1963] No. 408). 

Two years later, in 1818 Cowper received British patent No. 4194 for "Certain Improvements in Printing Presses or Machines Used for Printing."  This described a method of printing on both sides of sheet simultaneously, also called a perfecting press.

"In January 1818 Cowper patented his ink-distributing table, which was attached to the forme, and indentations at its sides gave an endwise motion to two distributing rollers in a movable carriage held on four bearings, and with two small friction pulleys attached. The ink was conveyed by a vibrating roller which was alternately in contact with the table and with a 'ductor or doctor' roller turning in an ink trough. The table and forme both passed under the inking rollers, which received ink from the table and inked the forme as it passed under them. In Cowper's specification the rollers are described as 'covered with leather, felt, composition (treacle and glue) &c.', an indication that he was still gradually working his way towards composition rollers at the time.

"Another Cowper improvement [included in the patent] concerned the method of conveying the sheet of paper from one cylinder to another in a perfecting machine by the construction of two subsidiary 'carrying drums' between the impression cylinders, on which the sheet was carried by means of two sets of endless strings, 'each composed of two or more strings kept tight by weights or springs', the printing cylinders and carrying drums being connected by means of toothed wheels" (Moran, Printing Presses. History & Development from the Fifteenth Century to Modern Times [1973] 127).

In 1822 American inventor William Church received British patent no. 4664 for "An Improved Apparatus for Printing." This patent which was illustrated with 8 large folding engineering drawings consisted of three parts: "first, a machine for casting the printing types, and also of arrangem them in boxes of letters, so that the types of the same denomination are placed side by side ranges, ready to be transferred to the composing machinery. The second part of the apparatus consists of a machine, by which the individual types are selected and composed into words and sentences. The third part of the aparatus is a press for printing and delivering the sheets into a pile" (Church's patent p. 2).

Church's composing machine was the first patented machine for type composition.

"While there is no evidence that a composing machine was built, the design included features which were embodied in later inventions. The type was stored in inclined channels, from which it was relased by the operation of a keyboard. The released type fell into a horizontal race where it was assembled by rocking arms into a continous line. Like other early composing machines, Church's did not provide for justification of the lines, leaving that to be done by hand. Power was provided by a clock-work mechanism" (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of an Exhibition at Earl's Court, London, 16-27 July 1963 [1963] No. 462.

Huss, Dr. Church's "Hoax": An Assessment of Dr. William Church's Typographical Inventions in which is enunciated Church's Law (1976).

In 1825 stationers and inventors John Phipps and Christopher Phipps of London received British patent No. 5075 for "An Improvement or Improvements in Machinery for Making Paper."  In their specification they described "the employment of a roller the cylinder part of which is formed of 'laid' wire. . . the effect produced by said roller is that of making impressions upon the sheet of paper upon which said roller passes and thus the paper so made has the appearance of 'laid' paper."  Thus, only a few years after machine-made paper was available, paper manufacturers desired to make machine-made paper resemble hand-made or laid paper.

In 1838 English printer and publisher Charles Knight received British patent No. 7673 for "Improvements in the Process and in the Apparatus used in the Production of Coloured Impressions on Paper, Vellum, Parchment, and Pasteboard by Surface Printing." Knight called his color printing process "illuminated printing," and invented it for the economical printing of colored pictures, maps, and drawings.

"At first only four colours were contemplated, and by some ingenious mechanism he contrived that they should all be applied in the course of a single passage of the sheet through the press, which was operated by hand. Knight, like Savage, had a decided preference for a press of the 'Ruthven' type, in which the platen was normally at the back, but was brought over the forme by means of two springs, which 'gave' to the pull, but resumed their ordinary position when the bar was released. Knight fitted the machine, in place of the usual bed, with a polygonal revolving frame, or, as he called it, 'prism' (attached to a rising table), each face of which, carrying a colour block, was applied in sucession to the sheet as the frame revolved. In an alternative method, the frame with the blocks on it revolved ona sort of turn-table, placed on the bed of the press; whilst in a third, the tympan, with the sheet attached, was carried from block to block. It will be remembered that this idea of printing several colours at one operation of the press had been to some extent anticpated by Lalleman, at Paris, two centuries earlier. The specification also describes an apparatus in which the colour blocks were on beds, hinged to the sides of a square table, and turned backward to be inked by hand, and down again for the impression. The process was in regular operation in 1839, as the Quarterly Review for December in that year contains an article, headed "The Printer's Devil," in which is a description of Clowes' printing establishment, and a fairly lengthy reference to Knight's colour-printing method, which the writer of the article in question saw at work, in connection with the production of "Patent Illuminated Maps." He describes the printing apparatus as resembling a square box, each of the four sides of which carried a printing plate, for blue, yellow, red and black respectively, which were applied to the sheet in the ordered named, the last having the letterpress matter for the names of places,etc. The tints being partly blended on the paper, three more were furnished in that way, i.e. the yellow and the red gave orange, the yellow and blue green, and so on, there being thus seven colours in all" (Burch, Colour Printing and Colour Printers [1910] 141-43).

In 1839 Knight issued a couple of examples of "illuminated printing" in his publication of Jackson's A Treatise on Wood Engraving Historical and Practical. One of my copies contains at p. 715 as called for in the List of Illustrations, "A Café in Constantinople, and a Design for a Pattern, two of "Mr. Knight's Patent Illuminated Prints." My other copy substitutes Knight's "Patent Illuminated Map" of Ancient Jerusalem, a double-page tip-in, for the Constantinople scene.  Both copies also contain a more finely detailed Baxter print of "Parsonage at Ovingham" at p. 713.

In 1840 Knight published a series of his "illuminated maps" in Hughes, The Illuminated Atlas of Scripture Geography: A Series of Maps Delineating the Physical and Historical Features in the Geography of Palestine and the Adjacent Countries accompanyied with An Explanatory Notice of Each Map. . . This small 4to contained 20 double-page maps color-printed by Knight's process. Regarding the maps, the work stated on p. 6:

"Lastly, we have to explain in a few words the peculiarities which distinguish the appearance of these Maps from any which have hitherto been published. These are, —1st, That, by a novel method of printing, the various divisions of the countries are covered with distinct colours, so that the boundaries are clearly perceived at the first view; and 2nd, That the mountains, instead of being, as in maps engraved in the usual manner, indicated by black lines, are in white, distinctly and prominently relieved by the coloured ground. In the best engraved maps a serious imperfection has always been felt to result from the names and the hills being alike printed in black, in consequence of which, either names are obscured by the hills, or the hills must be omitted in order to allow of the names being read. This renders them exceedingly difficult of reference; and it may be generally remarked of engraved maps, that in proportion as the physical features of country are fully and correctly delineated, so do the names and boundaries become obscure and unintelligble. In the ordinary process of map-engraving, the evil complained of appears unavoidable; but this is no longer the case when a different medium is used for conveying each part of the requisite information. By the method adopted in this series of Maps, the physical features of the countries—their hills and valleys—their lakes and streams—are clearly delinieated, without in the least interfering with the exhibition of names and places; while their various divisions, distinguished by colours, are presented at once and distinctly to the eye of the student. They will thus, it is believed, be found better calculated than any hitherto published to serve the important purposes of School and Home Education."

In 1840 James Hadden Young and Adrien Delcambre, both of whom were residents of Lille, France, received British patent no. 8428 for "An Improved Mode of Setting up Printing Types." 

Young and Delcambre's machine, as produced by Henry Bessemer, was the first typesetting machine used in a printing office.  Their machine was not a great improvement over William Church's invention of 1822.  The design of the Young & Delcambre machine led to its being called the "Pianotype."

"Type was held in long, narrow boxes from which it was releaed by a keyboard so that it slid down an inclined channel to a point where it was assembled into a line. The problem of making the type arrive in the right order, although solved by Church, had to be solved over again by Bessemer. He curved the channels to make them of equal length. . . " (Printing and the Mind of Man. Catalogue of the Exhibitions at the British Museum and at Earls Court, London 16-27 July 1963 [1963] No. 463.)

The first book set on the Young & Delcambre machine was Binns, Anatomy of Sleep (1842).

The graphic reproduction process which came to be called anastatic printing first began to be known in October 1841 when the proprietors of the London journal, the Athenaeum received from a correspondent in Berlin a reprint of 4 pages of their issue of September 25, containing some woodcut illustrations. This was so perfect a facsimile that they immediately inquired as to how it had been done, and they learned that it had been made by a secret new process.  In their issue No. 736 of December 4, 1841 the Athenaeum published a notice on p. 932 entitled "Printing and Piracy-New Discovery" concerning the dangers to the publishing industry that such a high quality facsimile method could pose, particularly with regard to expensive illustrated works, production of facsimiles of which had previously been assumed to be difficult and expensive. The new process, it was learned, had been invented by a C. F. Baldamus of Germany, and promoted by the German engineer and entrepreneur Carl Wilhelm Siemens, later known in England as William Siemens. Siemens went into partnership with the English engineer Joseph Woods, who developed the process and received British Patent No. 10,219 in 1844 for "Improvements in Producing Designs and Copies, and in Multiplying Impressions either of Printed or Written Surfaces." In the patent, which included 3 large folding engineering plans of machinery used, Woods proposed to call the process "anastatic printing." The process was rapidly adopted and used under other names such as "photozincography." 

On April 12, 1845 American writer, poet, editor, literary critic, and magazinist Edgar Allan Poe published in the Broadway Journal I, 229-231 an article entitled "Anastatic Printing."  With this new process of facsimile reproduction Poe foresaw huge advantages over the stereotype process, as anastatic printing plates could be produced quickly and cheaply, obviating the need to store bulky stereotype plates or flong.  He foresaw an increase in the production of pirated editions since anyone with anastatic equipment could reproduce any book they wanted.  Poe also believed that anastatic technology would enable authors to write out and publish their own books as facsimiles of manuscripts, including drawings, avoiding the costly and time-consuming typesetting process. 

Here is what Poe wrote:

"It is admitted by every one that of late there has been a rather singular invention, called Anastatic Printing, and that this invention may possibly lead, in the course of time, to some rather remarkable results — among which the one chiefly insisted upon, is the abolition of the ordinary stereotyping process: — but this seems to be the amount, in America at least, of distinct understanding on this subject.

" 'There is no exquisite beauty,' says Bacon, 'without some strangeness in the proportions.' The philosopher had reference, here, to beauty in its common acceptation; but the remark is equally applicable to all the forms of beauty — that is to say, to everything which arouses profound interest in the heart or intellect of man. In every such thing, strangeness — in other words novelty — will be found a principal element; and so universal is this law that it has no exception even in the case of this principal element itself. Nothing, unless it be novel — not even novelty itself — will be the source of very intense excitement among men. Thus the ennyue who travels in the hope of dissipating his ennui by the perpetual succession of novelties, will invariably be disappointed in the end. He receives the impression of novelty so continuously that it is at length no novelty to receive it. And the man, in general, of the nineteenth century — more especially of our own particular epoch of it — is very much in the predicament of the traveller in question. We are so habituated to new inventions, that we no longer get from newness the vivid interest which should appertain to the new — and no example could be adduced more distinctly showing that the mere importance of a novelty will not suffice to gain for it universal attention, than we find in the invention of Anastatic Printing. It excites not one fiftieth part of the comment which was excited by the comparatively frivolous invention of Sennefelder [sic]; — but he lived in the good old days when a novelty was novel. Nevertheless, while Lithography opened the way for a very agreeable pastime, it is the province of Anastatic Printing to revolutionize the world.

"By means of this discovery anything written, drawn, or printed, can be made to stereotype itself, with absolute accuracy, in five minutes.

"Let us take, for example, a page of this Journal; supposing only one side of the leaf to have printing on it. We dampen the leaf with a certain acid diluted, and then place it between two leaves of blotting-paper to absorb superfluous moisture. We then place the printed side in contact with a zinc plate that lies on the table. The acid in the interspaces between the letters, immediately corrodes the zinc, but the acid on the letters themselves, has no such effect, having been neutralized by the ink. Removing the leaf at the end of five minutes, we find a reversed copy, in slight relief, of the printing on the page; — in other words, we have a stereotype-plate, from which we can print a vast number of absolute facsimiles of the original printed page — which latter has not been at all injured in the process — that is to say, we can still produce from it (or from any impression of the stereotype plate) new stereotype plates ad libitum. Any engraving, or any pen-and-ink drawing, or any MS. can be stereotyped in precisely the same manner.

The facts of the invention are established. The process is in successful operation both in London and Paris. We have seen several specimens of printing done from the plates described, and have now lying before us a leaf (from the London Art-Union) covered with drawing, MS., letter-press, and impressions from wood-cuts, -the whole printed from the Anastatic stereotypes, and warranted by the Art-Union to be absolute fac-similes of the originals. The process can scarcely be regarded as a new invention, — and appears to be rather the modification and successful application of two or three previously ascertained principles -those of etching, electrography, lithography, etc. It follows from this that there will be much difficulty in establishing or maintaining a right of patent, and the probability is that the benefits of the process will soon be thrown open to the world. As to the secret — it can only be a secret in name. 

"That the discovery (if we may so call it) has been made can excite no surprise in any thinking person — the only matter for surprise is, that it has not been made many years ago. The obviousness of the process, however, in no degree lessens its importance. Indeed its inevitable results enkindle the imagination, and embarrass the understanding. Every one will perceive, at once, that the ordinary process of stereotyping will be abolished. Through this ordinary process, a publisher, to be sure, is enabled to keep on hand the means of producing edition after edition of any work the certainty of whose sale will justify the cost of stereotyping — which is trifling in comparison with that of re-setting the matter. But still, positively, this cost (of stereotyping) is great. Moreover, there cannot always be certainty about sales. Publishers frequently are forced to reset works which they have neglected to stereotype, thinking them unworthy the expense ; and many excellent works are not published at all, because small editions do not pay, and the anticipated sales will not warrant the cost of stereotype. Some of these difficulties will be at once remedied by the Anastatic Printing, and all will be remedied in a brief time. A publisher has only to print as many copies as are immediately demanded. He need print no more than a dozen, indeed, unless he feels perfectly confident of success. Preserving one copy, he can from this, at no other cost than that of the zinc, produce with any desirable rapidity, as many impressions as he may think proper. Some idea of the advantages thus accruing may be gleaned from the fact that in several of the London publishing warehouses there is deposited in stereotype plates alone, property to the amount of a million sterling.

"The next view of the case, in point of obviousness, is, that, if necessary, a hundred thousand impressions per hour, or even infinitely more, can be taken of any newspaper, or similar publication. As many presses can be put in operation as the occasion may require : — indeed there can be no limit to the number of copies producible, provided we have no limit to the number of presses. The tendency of all this to cheapen information, to diffuse knowledge and amusement, and to bring before the public the very class of works which are most valuable, but least in circulation on account of unsaleability — is what need scarcely be suggested to any one. But benefits such as these are merely the immediate and most obvious — by no means the most important.

"For some years, perhaps, the strong spirit of conventionality — of conservatism — will induce authors in general to have recourse, as usual, to the setting of type. A printed book, now, is more sightly, and more legible, than any MS. and for some years the idea will not be overthrown that this state of things is one of necessity. But by degrees it will be remembered that, while MS. was a necessity, men wrote after such fashion that no books printed in modern times have surpassed their MSS. either in accuracy or in beauty. This consideration will lead to the cultivation of a neat and distinct style of handwriting — for authors will perceive the immense advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher. All that a man of letters need do, will be to pay some attention to legibility of MS., arrange his pages to suit himself, and stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged. He may intersperse them with his own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, in the certainty of being fairly brought before his readers, with all the freshness of his original conception about him.

"And at this point we are arrested by a consideration of infinite moment, although of a seemingly shadowy character. The cultivation of accuracy in MS., thus enforced, will tend with an inevitable impetus to every species of improvement in style — more especially in the points of concision and distinctness- and this again, in a degree even more noticeable, to precision of thought, and luminous arrangement of matter. There is a very peculiar and easily intelligible reciprocal influence between the thing written and the manner of writing — but the latter has the predominant influence of the two. The more remote effect on philosophy at large, which will inevitably result from improvement of style and thought in the points of concision, distinctness, and accuracy, need only be suggested to be conceived.

"As a consequence of attention being directed to neatness and beauty of MS., the antique profession of the scribe will be revived, affording abundant employment to women — their delicacy of organization fitting them peculiarly for such tasks. The female amanuensis, indeed, will occupy very nearly the position of the present male type-setter, whose industry will be diverted perforce into other channels.

"These considerations are of vital importance — but there is yet one beyond them all. The value of every book is a compound of its literary value and its physical or mechanical value as the product of physical labor applied to the physical material. But at present the latter value immensely predominates, even in the works of the most esteemed authors. It will be seen, however, that the new condition of things will at once give the ascendency to the literary value, and thus by their literary values will books come to be estimated among men. The wealthy gentleman of elegant leisure will lose the vantage-ground now afforded him, and will be forced to tilt on terms of equality with the poor devil author. At present the literary world is a species of anomalous Congress, in which the majority of the members are constrained to listen in silence while all the eloquence proceeds from a privileged few. In the new regime, the humblest will speak as often and as freely as the most exalted, and will be sure of receiving just that amount of attention which the intrinsic merit of their speeches may deserve.

"From what we have said it will be evident that the discovery of Anastatic Printing will not only not obviate the necessity of copy-right laws, and of international law in especial, but will render this necessity more imperative and more apparent. It has been shown that in depressing the value of the physique of a, book, the invention will proportionately elevate the value of its morale, and since it is the latter value alone which the copy-right laws are needed to protect, the necessity of the protection will be only the more urgent and more obvious than ever."

The American patent No. 4, 239  for"Improvement in Anastatic Printing" was granted to C. F. Baldamus and F. W. Siemens of Berlin, Prussia on October 25, 1845. 

In 1849 inventor William Martin of St. Pierre-les-Calais, France, who characterized himself as a "mechanist," received British patent No. 12,421 for "Certain Improvements in Machinery for Figuring Fabrics, Parts of which Improvements are applicable to Playing certain Musical Instruments, and also to Printing and other like Purposes."

Besides describing improvements to Jacquard punched card or punched paper apparatus for weaving and for playing musical instruments such as a player piano, Martin described in his patent specification how his invention was applied to typesetting. Martin believed that the method would both speed up the typesetting process, and also allow typesetting information to be stored for future use in later editions. In his patent specification he wrote:

"A somewhat similarly constructed apparatus to that just described as applicable for playing musical instruments may also be applied to machinery or apparatus for composing or setting up type for letter-press printing. It is well known that types have been composed or set up by machinery, and that the mechanism of the apparatus generally employed for this purpose consists of a series of levers in connection with the keys of a finger board, arranged in somewhat the same manner as the keys of a pianoforte, organ, or other similar keyed instrument. The types are arranged in vertical columns behind these levers, and by depressing one of the keys with the finger the corresponding lever will be brought into action and a type or letter thereby pushed out from its column into a channel, along which it is carried to the composing stick. My improvements are applicable to any of the machines now in use, and which are worked by means of a key-board or other similar arrangement of levers that are acted on by the fingers of the compositor. In the Drawing, however, I have only shewn the Invention as applied to a machine constructed on the principle of Messrs. Clay and Rosenborg's Invention, in which the types are arranged in columns in front of an endless travelling belt or band on which they are published by small levers whenever the corresponding key is depressed.

"Figure 17 represents a section of a cylinder with moveable pins or pegs, and precisely similar in construction and operation to the cylinder shewn at Figures 12, 13, and 14. In order to avoid complexity in the Drawings, I have not thought it necessary to shew more than two or three pins or pegs; but it will of course be understood that the cylinder must be furnished with the property quantity of moveable pins arranged all round, as shewn in the other Figures. The perforated paper h passes over a slotted plate i, as in the former instance, and the perforation may be made in the paper either by means of a series of finger levers corresponding with the letters or characters , or by means of the reading machine already described. The operation of the apparatus is as follows:— The perforated paper h is made to pass slowly over the slotted plate i, the pin cylinder B being caused to rotate in the same direction, and at the same speed. By this means the pins or pegs c will be brought into contract with the perforated paper, and if they meet with holes in the paper they will enter, and thus causing their outer collars 2 to pass outside the supporting ring or guide g, as shewn at 3; the pin thus kept out will continue its progress until it reaches the under side of the bell-crank lever x, the outer end of which will therby be lifted up, and by means of a pusher w, at the opposite of the other arm of the lever, will push a single type or character out from the bottom of the column v into a channel in which (in Clay and Rosenborg's machine) there is a travelling endless band, which carries the type or character (thus thrust out) into the composing stick. Immediately that the pin or peg c escapes from the end of the lever x, the latter is brought back again into its original position by means of the spring y, and the pin or peg c continues its progress until it again comes in contact with another portion of the perforated paper; and if it meets with an unperforated part, it will be thrust inwards as seen at 4 (Fig. 12). It will of course be understood, that instead of pushing out the type or character on to the endless band, and therby carrying forward to the composing stick it may be pushed into an inclined channel, down which it will slide by its weight, as in the type-composing machines of Messrs. Young and Delcambre. The advantages resulting from the application of the perforated sheet of paper to this purpose are, that when once the paper is placed in the machine it will only be necessary to communicate motion to the several parts of the machine; as, as the peg or pin barrel b and the perforated paper rotate, the type will be set up or composed without further trouble; whereas, in the machines already existing, it requires a great deal of practice to be accustomed to the key or finger board and to work or set up the type with speed. Another advantage is, that when once a perforated paper has been made, it may, after being used, be kept until a second or third edition of the book to be printed is required, when it will only be necessary to place the paper in the machine and actuate the mechanism, and the type will be quickly composed or set up without the aid of a skilled workman."

Thompson, History of Composing Machines  (1904) p. 12  states that Martin's advanced ideas were not actually applied in the typesetting industry until 1867 when Alexander Mackie introduced it in his typesetting machine called the "Pickpocket." In 1887 Tobert Lanston invented the Monotype which was driven by punched paper rolls.

The Public Libraries Act 1850 (13 & 14 Vict c.65), an Act of the United Kingdom Parliament, gave local boroughs the power to establish free public libraries for the first time.

"The Act was the first legislative step in the creation of an enduring national institution that provides universal free access to information and literature, and was indicative of the moral, social and educative concerns of the time. The legacy of the Act can be followed through subsequent legislation that built on and expanded the powers granted in 1850 and the 4,540 public libraries that exist in the United Kingdom in 2010 can trace their origins back to this Act" (Wikipedia article on Public Libraries Act 1850).

In 1875 Frank Shepard, a salesman for a Chicago legal publisher, invented the Shepard's legal citation system. In the same year, Shepard designed and published the first of his many citation books, Illinois Citations.

"In legal research, Shepard's Citations is a citator, a list of all the authorities citing a particular case, statute, or other legal authority. The verb Shepardizing refers to the process of consulting Shepard's to see if a case has been overturned, reaffirmed, questioned, or cited by later cases. Although the name is trademarked, it is also used informally by legal professionals to describe citators in general—for example, Westlaw's similar tool called Key Cite" (Wikipedia article on Shepard's Citations, accessed 11-30-2012).

Alexander Graham Bell in Boston invented the telephone, and applied for the patent, which was issued to Bell as no. 174,465, on March 7, 1876, by the U.S. Patent Office. Bell's patent covered "the method of, and apparatus for, transmitting vocal or other sounds telegraphically . . . by causing electrical undulations, similar in form to the vibrations of the air accompanying the said vocal or other sound." In his invention of the telephone Bell was preceded by Philip Reis, who perfected his device in 1861, and numerous other inventors played lesser or greater roles. However, Bell was the first to create a telephone that could reproduce intelligible speech at the receiving end, and was also the first to patent the telephone. Because of the numerous other inventors involved there was unusually extensive and historic litigation over the telephone patents, culminating in Bell's victory. Among the controversies was the question of the priority of Elisha Gray in the invention.

As the well-known story goes, on March 10, 1876 Bell spoke the first words through the instrument to his assistant, Thomas A. Watson, in the next room. Bell said, "Mr. Watson— come here— I want to see you." 

Bell presented his first report on the telephone to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Boston on May 10, 1876. His report, "Researches in telephony," was published in Proceedings of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, new series 4 (whole series 12) (1877) 1-10.  Bell's telephone did not become commercially viable until 1878.

Hook & Norman, The Haskell F. Norman Library of Science & Medicine (1991) no. 164.

The Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works, an international agreement governing copyright, was ratified in Berne, Switzerland.

"The Berne Convention was developed at the instigation of Victor Hugo of the Association Littéraire et Artistique Internationale. Thus it was influenced by the French "right of the author" (droit d'auteur), which contrasts with the Anglo-Saxon concept of "copyright" which only dealt with economic concerns. Under the Convention, copyrights for creative works are automatically in force upon their creation without being asserted or declared. An author need not "register" or "apply for" a copyright in countries adhering to the Convention. As soon as a work is "fixed", that is, written or recorded on some physical medium, its author is automatically entitled to all copyrights in the work and to any derivative works, unless and until the author explicitly disclaims them or until the copyright expires. Foreign authors are given the same rights and privileges to copyrighted material as domestic authors in any country that signed the Convention."

In 1887 American inventor Tolbert Lanston of Washington, D.C. demonstrated his prototype of the Monotype machine. Lanston's typesetting machine consisted of a keyboard producing a perforated record of a job in a paper spool, something like a player piano roll, which controlled an associated machine for fashioning types from cold strips of metal with 196 matrices.

"The perforated tapes, of which he employed two, caused a strip of type metal to be fed into a compression box and the proper die to be centered above it, a section of the type metal cut off and compressed to form the type, which was then ejected on to the gallery, the entire operation of the typemaking machine being automatic. Justification was provided for on a novel principle.  A scale indicated to the operator of the perforating mechanism on completion of a line the amount of space yet unfilled and the perecentage which this bore to the filled space, he thereupon striking certain keys to cause perforations to be made at the end of the line. The tape was fed backward through the automatic typemaking machine and these last perforations caused the body of each letter in the line, or, if desired, only the spaces therein, to be increased above the normal such a percentage as to produce a line of justified type. In this machine electromagnets were employed to control the mechanism" (Thompson, History of Composing Machines  [1904] 120-21).

Notably Lanston demonstrated his machine three years after Mergenthaler invented the Linotype, and one year after the Linotype was usefully applied to production of the New York Daily Tribune Newspaper.

Both Lanston's U.S. and British patents are dated June 7, 1887. The British patent specification No. 8183, Improvements in the Art of Printing, in my collection makes 64 claims with respect to a mechanism for line justification and a method of type forming. It consists of 29 pages of text and 9 diagrams, of which 8 are double-page.

Lanston's statement begins:

"While astonishing progress has been made in those branches of the art of printing which relate to the taking of impressions and to the folding and delivery of the matter printed, but comparatively little practical advance has been made in that department which relates particularly to the setting up and justification of the lines from which the impressions are to be taken.

"Type setting machines of more or less efficiency it is true have been employed to assemble the types but, even where such machines have been successfully used it has always been found necessary to subject each line of composition to a process of justification involving, usually the introduction of suitable mechanism, or by hand, of additional spaces, or of the substitution of wide or narrow spaces, and vice versa, much the same as in the case of matter set up by hand.

"Machines have also been constructed with a view to the production of solid lines of justified composition, even in such machines the justification of the line is only secured by justifying the dies or molds which produce them and this justifying operation is performed in the ordinary manner, above referred to.

"My invention is a wide departure from the previous methods and proceeds upon a principle, which I believe to be radically new. Instead of producing a line of composition and then justifying it I form my types for a given line in such manner as to cause them when assembled, to form a complete justified line ready for printing direct or for making an impression for stereotype or electrotype purposes without further manipulation.

"In attempting to surplant by machinery the ancient process of setting type by hand the advantages to be derived from copying as many of the conditions of such hand set type as possible as [sic; should be "are"] manifest. By so doing, the mechanical products will be in harmony with all the other conditions of the art of printing as now practiced, will involve no departure from its usages and will permit the same method of correction of errors, interpolations, shifting of matter &c. as are now in vogue. It is well known that in ordinary composition where common type is used it rarely ever exactly fills a line of given length, the rule being that a space of greater or less length is left at the end of the line which must be filled up or absorbed in the process of justification. Now, since it is apparent that in every case this unoccupied space at the end of the line must bear a certain relation to the part of the line filled by the characters or in other words, represent a certain percentage of the combined width of such characters, it follows, that if there be added to the normal width of the body of each of the assembled types a percentage of increase, corresponding to the percentage which said unoccupied space represents to the occupied space, the line composed of types so formed will be rendered self justifying. . . . "(pp. 1-2).

Fred Ott's Sneeze, or Edison Kinetoscopic Record of a Sneeze, a 5-second black-and-white silent documentary film shot at 16 frames per second in 1894 by William K.L. Dickson and starring one of Edison's assistants, Fred Ott, was the first motion picture to be copyrighted in the United States. In the very brief film Fred Ott takes a pinch of snuff and sneezes. According to the Library of Congress the short was filmed for publicity purposes as a series of still photographs to accompany an article in Harper's Weekly.  The Library of Congress preserves a gelatin paper print of the film. 

Engineer Lucien Alphonse Legros, son of the painter Alphonse Legros, and writer John Cameron Grant published Typographical Printing-Surfaces. The Technology and Mechanism of their Production (London, 1916).  This 732 page work, with 609 figures in the text and 109 plates, became the standard and most authoritative work on hot-metal casting and composition technology. It also contained a complete listing of British patents pertaining to printing through 1912, and American patents through 1913.

Adolf Hitler published Mein Kampf in Munich, the first volume of which he dictated in prison to his associate Rudolf Hess after the abortive Beer Hall Putsch in Munich, November 1923.

One of the most influential books ever published, and possibly the most evil, the publication history, as well as the contents of this work, continue to be intensively reviewed by scholars, and read by people of different political persuasions, including extremists. The Wikipedia article on Mein Kampf contains unusually thorough documentation concerning its publication history.

Though publication of Mein Kampf was banned in some countries in 1947, it continued to sell widely in print in many languages, and according to a New York Times article published in November 2011, it had sold over 70 million copies by 2008.  It was also freely distributed on the Internet.  In 2011, with the pending expiration of its copyright, issues were raised concerning the dangers of allowing this text to circulate freely, and how it might be used to counteract prejudice and Holocaust denial, if that would be possible: 

"In 1947, Austria adopted the Verbotsgesetz — or “Prohibition Act” — banning the Nazi Party and criminalizing the celebration, promotion, or adulation of Nazi ideology; in the 1990s, it was amended to prohibit Holocaust denial. (It was under this law that the English writer David Irving was jailed a few years ago for denying the existence of the gas chambers.) Distributing and displaying Nazi paraphernalia is forbidden here. Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Lithuania — all these countries also criminalize revisionism and restrict various forms of speech and publications about the Holocaust. And for nearly 70 years, the German state of Bavaria, which holds the copyright for “Mein Kampf,” has fought heartily against the book’s publication in any country where it is possible to fight it.  

But now the rationale behind these restrictions is being questioned. While they may have helped limit the widespread distribution of “Mein Kampf” in Europe, repressive tactics of this kind have not aged well in the Internet era. (The book was never fully blocked anyway: in the 1980s, the U.S. Army sold it in some of its “Stars and Stripes” shops across Germany. And libraries often held copies.) Preventing a book’s publication today is largely a symbolic move.  

“Mein Kampf” is widely available, in its entirety, across the Web. It has been a hit in Japan and Turkey in recent years; it has sold briskly in South America and the Middle East; and it has shown up, like a nefarious inspiration, in such ugly places as the rantings of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. By 2008, an estimated 70,000,000 copies had been put into circulation since the book was first published in 1925, according to HatePrevention.org, a consortium of academics and activists. In other words, the restrictions on its publication may have enabled a kind of willful ignorance, a means of not recognizing the continued impact of the book’s ideas on society.  

"And so as Europe faces the end of the copyright on one of the most painful texts of the 20th century, some people now believe that the best course of action is not to extend the ban, but to publish 'Mein Kampf' with extensive annotations that explain how the book was used and what it wrought — that recognize its continued presence. 'Our idea is a zero-censorship effort,' says Philippe Coen, a French attorney at the forefront of HatePrevention.org, which organized the recent conference in Paris. He, like Dreyfus, favors the pedagogical approach to the publication of Hitler’s manifesto" (http://latitude.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/04/the-return-of-mein-kampf/?nl=opinion&emc=tyb1, accessed 12-14-2011).

Congress passed the Communications Act of 1934,  abolishing the Federal Radio Commission and transferring jurisdiction over radio licensing to a new Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The FCC also received the telecommunications jurisdiction previously handled by the Interstate Commerce Commission.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly of the Moore School at the University of Pennsylvania declared that their conception of the ENIAC was complete. Eckert wrote a letter to other members of the project asking them to state written claims to inventions on the project. None was received.

A patented invention from 1947 called The Cathode Ray Tube Amusement Device is probably the earliest interactive electronic game. American television pioneer Thomas T. Goldsmith Jr. of Cedar Grove, New Jersey, and Estle Ray Mann constructed the game from analog electronics and a cathode ray tube (CRT) .

Goldsmith and Mann's patent application dated January 25, 1947

"describes a game of skill in which a player sits or stands facing a cathode ray tube (CRT) video screen mounted in a cabinet. Goldsmith and Mann designed the game to resemble a World War II radar display, but with airplanes or some other targets painted onto a transparent overlay (since this invention preceded the era of computer graphics).

"The player turns a control knob to position the CRT beam on the screen; to the player, the beam appears as a dot, which represents a reticle or scope. The player has a restricted amount of time in which to maneuver the dot so that it overlaps an airplane, and then to fire at the airplane by pressing a button. If the beam falls within the preprogrammed coordinates of a target when the user presses the button, then the CRT beam defocuses, simulating an explosion. . . ." (Wikipedia article on Cathode ray tube amusement device, accessed 02-29-2012).

U.S. Patent 2,455,992 which describes the device, granted to Goldsmith and Estle Ray Mann in December 1948, and assigned to Allen B. DuMont Laboratories, is the earliest patent for an electronic game. The product was never commercially manufactured.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly learned from a patent lawyer that John von Neumann’s First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC was a publication barring their patenting the ENIAC because it was issued more than a year before they planned to apply for a patent.

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly applied for the broad ENIAC patent, essentially a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer. They based their description of the machine to a large extent on the government report they issued on November 30, 1945. (See Reading 8.10.)

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly of Philadelphia applied for a U.S. patent on the mercury acoustic delay-line electronic memory system. This was the "first device to gain widespread acceptance as a reliable computer memory system." (Hook & Norman, Origins of Cyberspace [2002] 1191). The patent 2,629,827 was granted in 1953.

Sperry Rand agreed to cross-license patents with IBM, thereby turning over strategic technology.

In 1960 John Horty at the Health Law Center, University of Pittsburgh, pioneered computer-assisted legal research by having the texts of relevant statutes keyed into punched cards and then transferred to computer tapes where they could be searched and retrieved by “key words in combination” (KWIC).

Widely considered the first software patent, "Prater-Wei" was about calculating temperatures for petroleum fractionation.  This patent, originally filed by Mobil Oil Corporation in 1960, addressed computerized spectographic analysis. It had many method and apparatus claims that could be performed either on an analog or digital computer, or with pencil and paper. At the time, software was not patentable, so the authors described a non-computer method of choosing the temperatures, using matrix inversion.  However, the description in the patent application used linear algebra notation similar to that of textbooks published late in the 19^th century to disguise the more obvious matrix notation that was invented much later. (adapted from Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 4.2, and Digital Document Quarterly 7.3, accessed 01-01-2009).

"A Court of Customs and Patent Appeals (CCPA) decision is famous because the question "whether computer programs could contain patentable subject matter" was also before the CCPA.  See Application of Charles D. Prater and James Wei, U.S. CCPA, 415 F.2d 1378, November 20, 1968." (Henry Gladney, Digital Document Quarterly 7,3, accessed 01-01-2009).

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly received U.S. patent no. 3,120,606 for the ENIAC— a general patent on the stored-program electronic computer, roughly 18 years after their application. Sperry Rand Univac, owner of the patent, charged a 1.5 percent royalty for all electronic computers sold by all companies except IBM, with which it had previously cross-licensed patents.  Since IBM manufactured the majority of computers produced at this time, the royalties on the patent were not as large as they could have been.

Data Corporation of Beavercreek, Ohio,  contracted with the Ohio Bar Automated Research Corporation to create a full-text, interactive research service for Ohio statutes.

In 1968 forest products manufacturer Mead Corporation of Dayton, Ohio, purchased Data Corporation.

On November 14, 1970 UNESCO, meeting in Paris, created the Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. 

"The 1970 Convention requires its States Parties to take action in these main fields:  

"Preventive measures:

"Inventories, export certificates, monitoring trade, imposition of penal or administrative sanctions, educational campaigns, etc.

"Restitution provisions:

"Per Article 7 (b) (ii) of the Convention, States Parties undertake, at the request of the State Party "of origin", to take appropriate steps to recover and return any such cultural property imported after the entry into force of this Convention in both States concerned, provided, however, that the requesting State shall pay just compensation to an innocent purchaser or to a person who has valid title to that property. More indirectly and subject to domestic legislation, Article 13 of the Convention also provides provisions on restitution and cooperation.

"International cooperation framework:

"The idea of strengthening cooperation among and between States Parties is present throughout the Convention. In cases where cultural patrimony is in jeopardy from pillage, Article 9 provides a possibility for more specific undertakings such as a call for import and export controls" 

Gilbert Hyatt filed a patent application entitled Single Chip Integrated Circuit Computer Architecture based on work begun in 1968.

Hyatt's patent was the first general patent on the microprocessor. Twenty years later, in 1990, the U.S. Patent Office awarded the patent to Hyatt, but was overturned in 1995.

Mead Data Central of Miamisburg, Ohio, introduced the Lexis and NAARS services.

"LEXIS provides the full text of Ohio and New York codes and cases, the U.S. code, and some federal case law. NAARS is the National Automated Accounting Research Service, a tax database from the American Institute of Certified Public Accountants."

Pres Eckert and John Mauchly’s ENIAC patent — a patent on the stored-program electronic digital computer — was ruled invalid in the case of Honeywell Inc. v. Sperry Rand Corporation et al. (See Reading 8.12.)

President Richard Nixon signed the Endangered Species Act  of 1973, designed to protect critically imperiled species from extinction as a:

"consequence of economic growth and development untempered by adequate concern and conservation."

"The stated purpose of the Endangered Species Act is to protect species and also "the ecosystems upon which they depend." It encompasses plants and invertebrates as well as vertebrates. It does not expressly include fungi, which were widely considered to be plants in 1973, [but which are now considered more closely related to animals than plants.]

"ESA is administered by two federal agencies, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) (which includes the National Marine Fisheries Service, or NMFS). NOAA handles marine species, and the FWS has responsibility over freshwater fish and all other species. Species that occur in both habitats (e.g. sea turtles and Atlantic sturgeon) are jointly managed."

"Few species have become extinct while listed under the Endangered Species Act, and 93% in the northeastern US have had their population sizes increase or remain stable since being listed as threatened or endangered. As of August, 28, 2008, there are 1,327 species on the threatened and endangered lists. However, many species have become extinct while on the candidate list or otherwise under consideration for listing" (Wikipedia article on Endangered Species Act, accessed 06-13-2009).

The first of the three Cohen-Boyer recombinant DNA cloning patents was granted, leading to the foundation of the biotechnology industry.

As a result of the Report of the Advisory Committee on Automated Personal Data Systems (July 1973), Congress passed the Privacy Act of 1974.

The Federal Government’s antitrust suit against IBM went to trial. The complaint for the case U.S. v. IBM was filed in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York on January 17, 1969 by the Justice Department. The suit alleged that IBM violated the Section 2 of the Sherman Act by monopolizing or attempting to monopolize the general purpose electronic digital computer system market, specifically computers designed primarily for business.

William Henry Gates III (Bill Gates), in his role as "General Partner Micro-Soft", Alubquerque, New Mexico, wrote An Open Letter to Hobbyists, making the distinction between proprietary and open-source software.

In 1978 the State of Florida passed Fla. Stat. 815.01, the "Florida Computer Crimes Act". This law, which included legislation against the unauthorized modification or deletion of data on a computer system, and against damage to computer hardware including networks, may be the earliest American statute specifically against computer crimes. The maximum penalty for a single offense classified as a Felony of the Third Degree was:

"Up to 5 years of imprisonment and a fine of up to $5,000 or any higher amount equal to double the pecuniary gain derived from the offense by the offender or double the pecuniary loss suffered by the victim."

"The concepts of frequency reuse and handoff as well as a number of other concepts that formed the basis of modern cell phone technology are first described in U.S. Patent 4,152,647, issued May 1, 1979 to Charles A. Gladden and Martin H. Parelman, both of Las Vegas, Nevada and assigned by them to the United States Government.

"This is the first embodiment of all the concepts that formed the basis of the next major step in mobile telephony, the Analog cellular telephone. Concepts covered in this patent (cited in at least 34 other patents) also were later extended to several satellite communication systems. Later updating of the cellular system to a digital system credits this patent" (Wikipedia article on Mobil phone, accessed 04-11-2009).

After thousands of hours of testimony (testimony of over 950 witnesses, 87 in court, the remainder by deposition) and the submission of tens of thousands of exhibits, the anti-trust case U.S. v. IBM was withdrawn on the grounds that the case is "without merit."

30,000,000 pages of documents were generated in the course of this anti-trust case.

Japanese software engineer Ryoichi Mori invented a digital products distribution system called superdistribution, incorporating one of the earliest forms of digital rights management.

Mori's  "Software Service System (SSS) took the form of a peer-to-peer-architecture with the following components:

◊"a cryptographic wrapper for digital products that cannot be removed and remains in place whenever the product is copied

◊"a digital rights management system for tracking usage of the product and assuring that any usage of the product or access to its code conforms to the terms set by the product's owner.

◊"an arrangement for secure payments from the product's users to its owner" (Wikipedia article on Superdistribution, accessed 01-03-2010).

During 1983 and the first part of 1984 Phoenix Technologies, then in Boston, Massachusetts, created the first commercially available IBM PC compatible ROM Bios. Licensability of this firmware interface, which would allow a computer to run the same operating system and the same applications as the IBM PC, enabled the rapid expansion of the IBM PC compatible computer industry. 

To defend against the inevitable copyright infringement suits expected to be brought by IBM, Phoenix engineers reverse-engineered the Bios using clean-room design, in which the software engineers had never read IBM's reference manuals: 

"Phoenix developed a 'clean room' technique that isolated the engineers who had been contaminated by reading the IBM source listings in the IBM Technical Reference Manuals. The contaminated engineers wrote specifications for the BIOS APIs and provided the specifications to 'clean' engineers who had not been exposed to IBM BIOS source code. Those 'clean' engineers developed code from scratch to mimic the BIOS APIs. This technique provided Phoenix with a defensibly non-infringing IBM PC-compatible ROM BIOS. Because the programmers who wrote the Phoenix code had never read IBM's reference manuals, nothing they wrote could have been copied from IBM's code, no matter how closely the two matched" (Wikipedia article on Phoenix Technologies, accessed 01-01-2013).

In Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., 714 F.2d 1240 (3d Cir. 1983) an appellate level court in the United States held for the first time that a computer's operating system could be protected by copyright.

"Franklin Computer Corporation [Burlington, New Jersey] introduced the Franklin Ace 100, a clone of Apple Computer's Apple II, in 1982. Apple quickly determined that substantial portions of the Franklin ROM and operating system had been copied directly from Apple's versions, and on May 12, 1982, filed suit in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. It cited the presence of some of the same embedded strings, such as the name "James Huston" (an Apple programmer), and "Applesoft," on both the Apple and Franklin system disks.

"Franklin admitted that it had copied Apple's software but argued that it would have been impractical to independently write its own versions of the software and maintain compatibility, although it said it had written its own version of Apple's copy utility and was working on its own versions of other software. Franklin argued that because Apple's software existed only in machine-readable form, and not in printed form, and because some of the software did not contain copyright notices, it could be freely copied. The Apple II firmware was likened to a machine part whose form was dictated entirely by the requirements of compatibility (that is, an exact copy of Apple's ROM was the only part that would "fit" in an Apple-compatible computer and enable its intended function), and was therefore not copyrightable.

"The district court found in favor of Franklin. However, Apple appealed the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit which, in a separate case decided three days after Franklin won at the lower level, determined that both a program existing only in a written form unreadable to humans (e.g. object code) and one embedded on a ROM were protected by copyright. (See Williams Elec., Inc., v. Artic Int'l, Inc., 685 F.2d 870 (1982)). The Court of Appeals overturned the district court's ruling in Franklin by applying its holdings in Williams and going further to hold that operating systems were also copyrightable" (Wikipedia article on Apple Computer, Inc. v. Franklin Computer Corp., accessed 01-01-2013).

"In 1972, the United States Senate gave its unanimous advice and consent to the 1970 UNESCO Convention. However, because the Convention did not have a basis in U.S. law, special legislation was required to allow the U.S. to implement it. In 1982, Congress passed the Convention on Cultural Property Implementation Act (the "Act"), and President Ronald Reagan signed it into law in January 1983. The Act enables the U.S. government to implement Articles 7(b)(1) and 9 of the Convention. (See the Act as Public Law 97-446 (PDF); or as 19 U.S.C. 2601 et seq. (PDF))  

"Briefly, pursuant to Article 7(b)(1), States that are party to the Convention undertake to prohibit the importation of documented cultural property stolen from museums or religious or secular public monuments in another State Party to the Convention. Article 9 of the Convention allows any State Party whose cultural patrimony is in jeopardy from pillage to request assistance from other States Parties to carry out measures such as the control of exports, imports, and international commerce in the specific cultural materials concerned."

The Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991 (TCPA) was passed by the United States Congress and signed into law by President George H. W. Bush as Public Law 102-243, amending the Communications Act of 1934.

"The TCPA is the primary law in the US governing the conduct of telephone solicitations, ie. telemarketing. The TCPA restricts the use of automatic dialing systems, artificial or prerecorded voice messages, SMS text messages received by cell phones, and the use of fax machines to send unsolicited advertisements. It also specifies several technical requirements for fax machines, autodialers, and voice messaging systems -- principally with provisions requiring identification and contact information of the entity using the device to be contained in the message" (Wikipedia article on Telephone Consumer Protection Act of 1991, accessed 10-31-2009).

One of the first U.S. cases related to Cyberspace law was decided: Cubby v. CompuServe, 776 F. Supp. 135 (1991). It "suggested that online companies would not be liable for the acts of their customers. CompuServe exerted no control whatsoever over the presumably false and defamatory statements which were the subject of the suit; their forum sysops were independent entrepreneurs. Prior to this decision, the liability risk was largely undecided."

Villanova Law Review Symposium: The Congress, The Courts, and Computer-Based Communications Networks: Answering Questions About Access and Content Control was "perhaps the first law review symposium dedicated to cyberspace."

David Banisar, Marc Rotenberg, and David Sobel founded The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) in Washington, D.C. to focus public attention on emerging civil liberties issues and to protect privacy, the First Amendment, and constitutional values in the information age. EPIC was a joint project of the Fund for Constitutional Government and Computer Professionals for Social Responsibility.

John Perry Barlow, lyricist for The Grateful Dead, published in Wired magazine an article entitled The Economy of Ideas. A framework for patents and copyrights in the Digital Ages. (Everything you know about intellectual property is wrong.)

This, or a very similar text, was also issued under the title of: Selling Wine Without Bottles: The Economy of Mind on the Global Net.

The Unites States Court of Appeals, Fifth Circuit, based in New Orleans, Louisiana, decided Steve Jackson Games v. U.S. Secret Service,36 F.3d 457 (5th Cir. 1994).

"The narrow issue before us is whether the seizure of a computer, used to operate an electronic bulletin board system, and containing private electronic mail which had been sent to (stored on) the bulletin board, but not read (retrieved) by the intended recipients, constitutes an unlawful intercept under the Federal Wiretap Act, 18 U.S.C. s 2510, et seq., as amended by Title I of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act of 1986, Pub.L. No. 99-508, Title I, 100 Stat. 1848 (1986). We hold that it is not, and therefore AFFIRM."

In 1996 LexisNexis online services, Miamisburg, Ohio, exceeded one billion documents.

At a Diplomatic Conference on Certain Copyright and Neighboring Rights Questions, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO), Geneva, Switzerland, adopted the WIPO Copyright Treaty.

In Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union all 9 Justices of the United States Supreme Court voted to strike down anti-obscenity provisions of the Communications Decency Act (the "CDA"), finding they violated the freedom of speech provisions of the First Amendment. Two Justices concurred in part and dissented in part to the decision. This was the first major Supreme Court ruling regarding the regulation of materials distributed via the Internet.

The Court rules that "223(a)(1)(B), §223(a)(2), §223(d) of the CDA are unconstitutional and unenforceable, except for cases of obscenity or child pornography, because they abridge the freedom of speech protected by the First Amendment and are substantially overbroad. The Internet is entitled to the full protection given to media like the print press; the special factors justifying government regulation of broadcast media do not apply.

"The CDA was an attempt to protect minors from explicit material on the Internet by criminalizing the 'knowing' transmission of "obscene or indecent" messages to any recipient under 18; and also the knowing sending to a person under 18 of anything 'that, in context, depicts or describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or excretory activities or organs' " (Wikipedia article on Reno v. American Civil Liberties Union).

The U.S. Congress passed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act.

The U. S. Supreme Court ruled that Internet domain names are property.

American computer programmer and entrepreneur Shawn Fanning released the Napster file sharing service for MP3 files from his headquarters in Hull, Massachusetts. After Napster's early explosive success Fanning moved the company to San Mateo, California. "The original company ran into legal difficulties over copyright infringement, ceased operations and was eventually acquired by Roxio. In its second incarnation Napster became an online music store until it merged with Rhapsody on 1 December 2011" (Wikipedia article on Napster, accessed 03-18-2012).

"It [Napster] was the first of the massively popular peer-to-peer file sharing systems, although it was not fully peer-to-peer since it used central servers to maintain lists of connected systems and the files they provided, while actual transactions were conducted directly between machines. Although there were already media which facilitated the sharing of files across the Internet, such as IRC, Hotline, and USENET, Napster specialized exclusively in music in the form of MP3 files and presented a friendly user-interface. The result was a system whose popularity generated an enormous selection of music to download."

An unlikely alliance of disgruntled Labor backbenchers and Tories in the British Parliament defeated a move to end the centuries-old tradition of printing copies of Acts of Parliament on vellum, by 121 votes to 53. Remarkably this also shows that the centuries-old debate continued on whether paper or vellum are the more permanent material for the storage of information.

"Under the scheme, already approved by the Lords, instead of two copies printed on vellum, only one would be produced on archive paper which has a life expectancy of 500 years.

“Labour's Nick Palmer, a Commons administration committee member, urged MPs to approve the change - which would have saved £30,000 a year and the skin of several goats.

“But opposition to it was led by Labour's Brian White (Milton Keynes NE) who said it would almost certainly put 12 people at William Cowley, a parchment and vellum printing company in his constituency, out of work and mean the death of the industry in Britain.

"He claimed the committee had not consulted the firm about the change until it was too late, and urged MPs to find a "different way forward that doesn't destroy an industry".

“Acts of Parliament dating back to 1497 recorded on vellum are currently held in the House of Lords Public Record Office.

“Under the proposed change duplicate copies of Acts of Parliament would also no longer be placed in the Public Record Office at Kew, replacing a resolution decreed in 1849 that two copies of every Act should be printed on vellum.

“Opening the short debate, Dr Palmer (Broxtowe) said the committee considered the change "appropriate and justifiable".

“Continuing to deposit duplicate record copies of both public and private Acts at the Public Record Offices appeared to "serve no useful purpose".

“Dr Palmer dismissed concerns about the durability of archive paper compared with vellum as "groundless".

“He said vellum and archive paper were both flammable so security could not depend alone on the document.

“Dr Palmer said he found it "attractive" that Parliament would not be using animal products where it was not necessary, although it was not one of the arguments advanced by the committee report.

“'We didn't have sentiment or animal welfare consideration affecting our judgment here, we reached it for practical, you might even say prosaic, reasons,' he said.

“Dr Palmer said British Library conservation department laboratory tests had proved that archival paper could have a life expectancy exceeding 500 years.

“But Tory Gerald Howarth (Aldershot) said: "I don't believe that this kind of tradition should lightly be tossed aside."

“Mr Howarth said the death warrant of Charles I was recorded on vellum and added: 'Who is to say whether archival paper will last 300 to 400 years? We shouldn't take the chance.' "

quoted from BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/502342.stm accessed 12-04-2008.

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act (also known as Truth in Domain Names Act), was enacted into U.S. law as is part of A bill to amend the provisions of title 17, United States Code, and the Communications Act of 1934, relating to copyright licensing and carriage of broadcast signals by satellite (S. 1948). The act mades people who registered domain names that are either trademarks or individual's names with the sole intent of selling the rights of the domain name to the trademark holder or individual for a profit liable to civil action.

"In order for a trademark owner to bring a claim under the ACPA, the owner must establish

• the trademark owner’s mark is distinctive or famous;
• the domain name owner acted in bad faith to profit from the mark; and
• the domain name and the trademark are either identical or confusingly similar (or dilutive for famous trademarks)" 

(Wikipedia article on Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act, accessed 11-24-2008).

The Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act was enacted in part because the domain whitehouse.com went online in 1997 as an "adult entertainment" site, leading to this letter from a Whitehouse consel:

"The following is a December letter from a White House counsel to the operator of the "whitehouse.com" adult site regarding the use of the domain and the names and images of the White House, President Clinton, and Hillary Clinton on the site:

"The White House

"Washington

"December 8, 1997

"Mr. Dan Parisi

"Secaucus, New Jersey

"Dear Mr. Parisi:

"It will come as no surprise to you that the White House Counsel's Office is aware of your Internet Web site, "www.whitehouse.com," and that we object to your use of the names and images of the White House, the President, and the First Lady on that Web site to sell memberships in an adult video club. We also recognize that you undoubtedly will use this letter as an object of humor and as an invitation to advance the claim that you are merely exercising your rights under the First Amendment.

"We too believe in the First Amendment--and in humor, although we see nothing humorous in your use of the White House domain name to draw children and other unwitting Internet users to your Web site. However distasteful your business may be, we do not challenge your right to pursue it or to exercise your First Amendment rights, but we do challenge your right to use the White House, the President, and the First Lady as a marketing device. For adult internet users, that device is, at the least, part of a deceptive scheme. For younger Internet users, it has more disturbing consequences. As your own online disclaimer implicitly acknowledges, the foreseeable result of your use of the White House domain name is that children will access your Web site inadvertently. Your customers will understand that such a result is unconscionable, and so, we submit, should you.

Sincerely,

Charles F.C. Ruff

Counsel to the President" (http://news.cnet.com/2009-1023-207800.html, accessed 06-15-2009).

Lawrence Lessig of Stanford Law School published Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, in which he argued:

"that cyberspace changes not only the technology of copying but also the power of law to protect against illegal copying (125-127). He explores the notion that computer code may regulate conduct in much the same way that legal codes do. He goes so far as to argue that code displaces the balance in copyright law and doctrines such as fair use (135). If it becomes possible to license every aspect of use (by means of trusted systems created by code), then no aspect of use would have the protection of fair use(136). The importance of this side of the story is generally underestimated and, as the examples will show, very often, code is even (only) considered as an extra tool to fight against 'unlimited copying'."

Credit Default Swaps, invented in 1997 by a team working for JPMorgan Chase, became legal, and illegal to regulate, with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000.

The Senate and House versions of this bill were introduced and rushed through congress on the last day before the Christmas holiday. The 11,000-page bill was never debated in the House or the Senate. Less than a week after it was passed by congress, President Clinton signed it into Public Law (106-554) on December 21, 2000. (adapted from the Wikipedia article on Credit Default Swap).

The 19th Session of the National People's Congress of China adopted the Decision of the Standing Committee of NPC Regarding the Safeguarding of Internet Security.

Lawrence Lessig, at the time of writing a professor at Stanford Law School, published The Future of Ideas: The fate of commons in a connected world, in which he argued that while

". . . copyright helps artists get rewarded for their work, . . . a copyright regime that is too strict and grants copyright for too long a period of time (i.e. the current US legal climate) can destroy innovation, as the future movements by corporate interests to promote longer and tighter protection ofintellectual property in three layers: the code layer, the content layer, and the physical layer. . . . In the end, he stresses the importance of existing works entering the public domain in a reasonably short period of time, as the founding fathers intended."

The Ninth Circuit Court, San Francisco, issued an injunction ordering Napster to prevent the trading of copyrighted music on its network.

American computer programmer Bram Cohen of San Francisco released the first implementation of the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file sharing protocol for distributing large amounts of data.

The online music store subscription service, Rhapsody, was launched in Seattle, Washington in December 2001.

"Downloaded files come with restrictions on their use, enforced by Helix, Rhapsody's version of digital rights management enforced on AAC+ or WMA files. The service also sells individual MP3s without digital rights management restrictions" (Wikipedia article on Rhapsody, accessed 03-18-2012).

Creative Commons, founded in 2001, released as its first project, a set of copyright licenses free for public use.

"Taking inspiration in part from the Free Software Foundation’s GNU General Public License (GNU GPL), Creative Commons has developed a Web application that helps people dedicate their creative works to the public domain — or retain their copyright while licensing them as free for certain uses, on certain conditions. Unlike the GNU GPL, Creative Commons licenses are not designed for software, but rather for other kinds of creative works: websites, scholarship, music, film, photography, literature, courseware, etc. We hope to build upon and complement the work of others who have created public licenses for a variety of creative works. Our aim is not only to increase the sum of raw source material online, but also to make access to that material cheaper and easier. To this end, we have also developed metadata that can be used to associate creative works with their public domain or license status in a machine-readable way. We hope this will enable people to use our search application and other online applications to find, for example, photographs that are free to use provided that the original photographer is credited, or songs that may be copied, distributed, or sampled with no restrictions whatsoever. We hope that the ease of use fostered by machine- readable licenses will further reduce barriers to creativity."

A Federal regulatory clearinghouse, Regulations.gov, was launched as the first milestone of the Federal "E-Government eRulemaking" Initiative.

"This U.S. Government Web site encourages public participation in the federal decision-making by allowing you to view and submit comments and documents concerning federal regulations, adjudication, and other actions. Regulations.gov provides one-stop, online access to every rule published and open for comment, from more than 160 different Federal agencies.

"Regulations.gov has created universal access to the Federal regulatory process by removing barriers that previously made it difficult for the public to navigate the expanse of Federal regulatory activities. Regulations.gov is the first one-stop Internet site for the public to submit comments on all Federal rulemakings. It is also the first site that allows the public to submit comments via the Internet to virtually all Federal Agencies.

"The new generation of Regulations.gov, the eRulemaking Initiative's Federal Docket Management System (FDMS), launched in the fall of 2005, enabled the public to access entire rulemaking dockets from participating Federal Departments and Agencies. FDMS is a full-featured electronic docket management system that builds upon the capabilities of the original Regulations.gov and gives Federal rule writers and docket managers the ability to better manage their rulemaking and non-rulemaking activities. With this system, Federal Departments and Agencies can post Federal Register documents, supporting materials, and public comments on the Internet. The public can search, view, and download these documents on FDMS' public side, Regulations.gov."

The Privacy Rule of the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) went into effect.

"The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) was enacted by the U.S. Congress in 1996. According to the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) website, Title I of HIPAA protects health insurance coverage for workers and their families when they change or lose their jobs. Title II of HIPAA, known as the Administrative Simplification (AS) provisions, requires the establishment of national standards for electronic health care transactions and national identifiers for providers, health insurance plans, and employers. It helps people keep their information private.

"The Administration Simplification provisions also address the security and privacy of health data. The standards are meant to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the nation's health care system by encouraging the widespread use of electronic data interchange in the U.S. health care system."

"The HIPAA Privacy Rule regulates the use and disclosure of certain information held by 'covered entities' (generally, health care clearinghouses, employer sponsored health plans, health insurers, and medical service providers that engage in certain transactions.)  It establishes regulations for the use and disclosure of Protected Health Information (PHI). PHI is any information held by a covered entity which concerns health status, provision of health care, or payment for health care that can be linked to an individual. This is interpreted rather broadly and includes any part of an individual's medical record or payment history.

"Covered entities must disclose PHI to the individual within 30 days upon request. They also must disclose PHI when required to do so by law, such as reporting suspected child abuse to state child welfare agencies.

"A covered entity may disclose PHI to facilitate treatment, payment, or health care operations, or if the covered entity has obtained authorization from the individual. However, when a covered entity discloses any PHI, it must make a reasonable effort to disclose only the minimum necessary information required to achieve its purpose.

"The Privacy Rule gives individuals the right to request that a covered entity correct any inaccurate PHI. It also requires covered entities to take reasonable steps to ensure the confidentiality of communications with individuals. . . .

"The Privacy Rule requires covered entities to notify individuals of uses of their PHI. Covered entities must also keep track of disclosures of PHI and document privacy policies and procedures. They must appoint a Privacy Official and a contact person responsible for receiving complaints and train all members of their workforce in procedures regarding PHI.

"An individual who believes that the Privacy Rule is not being upheld can file a complaint with the Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR). However, according to the Wall Street Journal, the OCR has a long backlog and ignores most complaints. 'Complaints of privacy violations have been piling up at the Department of Health and Human Services. Between April 2003 and Nov. 30, the agency fielded 23,896 complaints related to medical-privacy rules, but it has not yet taken any enforcement actions against hospitals, doctors, insurers or anyone else for rule violations. A spokesman for the agency says it has closed three-quarters of the complaints, typically because it found no violation or after it provided informal guidance to the parties involved' " (Wikipedia article on Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, accessed 08-05-2009).

"The CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 (15 U.S.C. 7701, et seq., Public Law No. 108-187, was S.877 of the 108th United States Congress), signed into law by President George W. Bush established the United States' first national standards for the sending of commercial e-mail and requires the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to enforce its provisions.

"The acronym CAN-SPAM derives from the bill's full name: Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography And Marketing Act of 2003. This is also a play on the usual term for unsolicited email of this type, spam. The bill was sponsored in Congress by Senators Conrad Burns and Ron Wyden.

"The CAN-SPAM Act is commonly referred to as the "You-Can-Spam" Act because the bill explicitly legalizes most e-mail spam. In particular, it does not require e-mailers to get permission before they send marketing messages. It also prevents states from enacting stronger anti-spam protections, and prohibits individuals who receive spam from suing spammers. The Act has been largely unenforced, despite a letter to the FTC from Senator Burns, who noted that "Enforcement is key regarding the CAN-SPAM legislation." In 2004 less than 1% of spam complied with the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003.

"The law required the FTC to report back to Congress within 24 months of the effectiveness of the act.[4] No changes were recommended. It also requires the FTC to promulgate rules to shield consumers from unwanted mobile phone spam. On December 20, 2005 the FTC reported that the volume of spam has begun to level off, and due to enhanced anti-spam technologies, less was reaching consumer inboxes. A significant decrease in sexually-explicit e-mail was also reported.

"Later modifications changed the original CAN-SPAM Act of 2003 by (1) Adding a definition of the term "person"; (2) Modifying the term "sender"; (3) Clarifying that a sender may comply with the act by including a post office box or private mailbox and (4) Clarifying that to submit a valid opt-out request, a recipient cannot be required to pay a fee, provide information other than his or her email address and opt-out preferences, or take any other steps other than sending a reply email message or visiting a single page on an Internet website" (Wikipedia article on CAN-SPAM Act of 2003, accessed 01-19-2010).

Beth Noveck, director of New York Law School's Institute for Information Law and Policy, issued “Peer to Patent” (PtoP): A Modest Proposal in her blog. The proposal "would shift the patent-application process away from individual examiners to an internet-based, peer-review method."

In response to copyright problems Google announced a moratorium on the scanning of copyrighted books for its Google Print Library Project.

Microsoft announced that it was joining the Open Content Alliance founded by Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive. The Open Content Alliance was formed partly in response to Google Print, renamed Google Books.

On January 31, 2006 The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) filed a class-action lawsuit against AT&T accusing the telecom giant of violating the law and the privacy of its customers by collaborating with the National Security Agency (NSA) in "its massive illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans' communications."

"In Hepting v. AT&T, EFF sued the telecommunications giant on behalf of its customers for violating privacy law by collaborating with the NSA in the massive, illegal program to wiretap and data-mine Americans’ communications.  

"Evidence in the case includes undisputed evidenceprovided by former AT&T telecommunications technician Mark Klein showing AT&T has routed copies of Internet traffic to a secret room in San Francisco controlled by the NSA.  

"In June of 2009, a federal judge dismissed Hepting and dozens of other lawsuits against telecoms, ruling that the companies had immunity from liability under the controversial FISA Amendments Act (FISAAA), which was enacted in response to our court victories in Hepting. Signed by President Bush in 2008, the FISAAA allows the Attorney General to require the dismissal of the lawsuits over the telecoms' participation in the warrantless surveillance program if the government secretly certifies to the court that the surveillance did not occur, was legal, or was authorized by the president -- certification that was filed in September of 2008. EFF is planning to appeal the decision to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, primarily arguing that FISAAA is unconstitutional in granting to the president broad discretion to block the courts from considering the core constitutional privacy claims of millions of Americans" (https://www.eff.org/nsa/hepting, accessed 01-14-2014).

IBM, the largest patent holder in the U.S., announced that it "will publish its patent filings on the Web for public review as part of a new policy that the company hopes will be a model for others."

The Authors Guild, New York, the Association of American Publishers (AAP) Washington, D.C., and New York, and Google announced a groundbreaking settlement agreement "on behalf of a broad class of authors and publishers worldwide that would expand online access to millions of in-copyright books and other written materials in the U.S. from the collections of a number of major U.S. libraries participating in Google Book Search. The agreement, reached after two years of negotiations, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought by book authors and the Authors Guild, as well as a separate lawsuit filed by five large publishers as representatives of the AAP’s membership. The class action is subject to approval by the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

"If approved by the court, the agreement would provide:

• More Access to Out-of-Print Books – Generating greater exposure for millions of in-copyright works, including hard-to-find out-of-print books, by enabling readers in the U.S. to search these works and preview them online;
• Additional Ways to Purchase Copyrighted Books – Building off publishers’ and authors’ current efforts and further expanding the electronic market for copyrighted books in the U.S., by offering users the ability to purchase online access to many in-copyright books;
• Institutional Subscriptions to Millions of Books Online – Offering a means for U.S. colleges, universities and other organizations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world’s most renowned libraries;
• Free Access From U.S. Libraries – Providing free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
• Compensation to Authors and Publishers and Control Over Access to Their Works – Distributing payments earned from online access provided by Google and, prospectively, from similar programs that may be established by other providers, through a newly created independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will also locate rightsholders, collect and maintain accurate rightsholder information, and provide a way for rightsholders to request inclusion in or exclusion from the project."

Cultural historian, book historian, and librarian Robert Darnton, of Harvard University, published the insightful and critical article, "Google and the Future of Books" in the New York Review of Books.

"How can we navigate through the information landscape that is only beginning to come into view? The question is more urgent than ever following the recent settlement between Google and the authors and publishers who were suing it for alleged breach of copyright. For the last four years, Google has been digitizing millions of books, including many covered by copyright, from the collections of major research libraries, and making the texts searchable online. The authors and publishers objected that digitizing constituted a violation of their copyrights. After lengthy negotiations, the plaintiffs and Google agreed on a settlement, which will have a profound effect on the way books reach readers for the foreseeable future. What will that future be?

"No one knows, because the settlement is so complex that it is difficult to perceive the legal and economic contours in the new lay of the land. But those of us who are responsible for research libraries have a clear view of a common goal: we want to open up our collections and make them available to readers everywhere. How to get there? The only workable tactic may be vigilance: see as far ahead as you can; and while you keep your eye on the road, remember to look in the rearview mirror." (quotations from the beginning of Darnton's longish article, accessed 01-28-2009).

Solid Oak Software Inc, developer of CyberSitter, alleged that an Internet-filtering program called Green Dam Youth Escort produced in China and mandated by the Chinese government, contained stolen portions of the company's code.

"Solid Oak Software, the developer of CyberSitter, claims that the look and feel of the GUI used by Green Dam mimics the style of CyberSitter. But more damning, chief executive Brian Milburn said, was the fact that the Green Dam code uses DLLs identified with the CyberSitter name, and even makes calls back to Solid Oak's servers for updates" (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2348705,00.asp, accessed 06-13-2009).

Solid Oak Software Inc. said it will try to stop PC makers from shipping computers with the software.

"Solid Oak said Friday that it found pieces of its CyberSitter filtering software in the Chinese program, including a list of terms to be blocked, instructions for updating the software, and an old news bulletin promoting CyberSitter. Researchers at the University of Michigan who have been studying the Chinese program also said they found components of CyberSitter, including the blacklist of terms.

"Jinhui Computer System Engineering Co., the Chinese company that made the filtering software, denied stealing anything. "That's impossible," said Bryan Zhang, Jinhui's founder, in response to Solid Oak's charges.

"The allegations come as PC makers such as Dell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. are sorting through a mandate by the Chinese government requiring that all PCs sold in China as of July come with the filtering software. Representatives of the two big U.S. companies said they are working with trade associations to monitor new developments related to the Chinese software" (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124486910756712249.html, accessed 06-13-2009).

"In George Orwell’s '1984,' government censors erase all traces of news articles embarrassing to Big Brother by sending them down an incineration chute called the 'memory hole.'

"On Friday, it was '1984' and another Orwell book, 'Animal Farm,' that were dropped down the memory hole — by Amazon.com.

"In a move that angered customers and generated waves of online pique, Amazon remotely deleted some digital editions of the books from the Kindle devices of readers who had bought them.

"An Amazon spokesman, Drew Herdener, said in an e-mail message that the books were added to the Kindle store by a company that did not have rights to them, using a self-service function. 'When we were notified of this by the rights holder, we removed the illegal copies from our systems and from customers’ devices, and refunded customers,' he said.

'Amazon effectively acknowledged that the deletions were a bad idea. 'We are changing our systems so that in the future we will not remove books from customers’ devices in these circumstances,' Mr. Herdener said" (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/18/technology/companies/18amazon.html, accessed 07-25-2009).

"Books in the real world are covered by a notion of copyright called the 'first sale' doctrine, which allows a purchaser to do pretty much whatever he or she wants with the book–including reselling it or lending it to a friend.

"But digital books–especially if they’re sold as part of access to a networked system such as Amazon’s Kindle Store and Google’s online books collection–don’t necessarily fall under those same rules. 'We have not matured our understanding of copyright to work in a digital environment in way that provides a set of protections and meets people’s expectations for how we use digital content,' said Brantley" (http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2009/07/17/an-orwellian-moment-for-amazons-kindle/, accessed 07-25-2009).

Sergey Brin, co-founder and technology president of Google published an Op-Ed piece regarding the Google Book Search program in The New York Times entitled, perhaps overly optimistically, "A Library to Last Forever," from which I quote without implied endorsement:

".  . .the vast majority of books ever written are not accessible to anyone except the most tenacious researchers at premier academic libraries. Books written after 1923 quickly disappear into a literary black hole. With rare exceptions, one can buy them only for the small number of years they are in print. After that, they are found only in a vanishing number of libraries and used book stores. As the years pass, contracts get lost and forgotten, authors and publishers disappear, the rights holders become impossible to track down.

"Inevitably, the few remaining copies of the books are left to deteriorate slowly or are lost to fires, floods and other disasters. While I was at Stanford in 1998, floods damaged or destroyed tens of thousands of books. Unfortunately, such events are not uncommon - a similar flood happened at Stanford just 20 years prior. You could read about it in The Stanford-Lockheed Meyer Library Flood Report, published in 1980, but this book itself is no longer available.

"Because books are such an important part of the world's collective knowledge and cultural heritage, Larry Page, the co-founder of Google, first proposed that we digitize all books a decade ago, when we were a fledgling startup. At the time, it was viewed as so ambitious and challenging a project that we were unable to attract anyone to work on it. But five years later, in 2004, Google Books (then called Google Print) was born, allowing users to search hundreds of thousands of books. Today, they number over 10 million and counting.

"The next year we were sued by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers over the project. While we have had disagreements, we have a common goal - to unlock the wisdom held in the enormous number of out-of-print books, while fairly compensating the rights holders. As a result, we were able to work together to devise a settlement that accomplishes our shared vision. While this settlement is a win-win for authors, publishers and Google, the real winners are the readers who will now have access to a greatly expanded world of books.

"There has been some debate about the settlement, and many groups have offered their opinions, both for and against. I would like to take this opportunity to dispel some myths about the agreement and to share why I am proud of this undertaking. This agreement aims to make millions of out-of-print but in-copyright books available either for a fee or for free with ad support, with the majority of the revenue flowing back to the rights holders, be they authors or publishers.

"Some have claimed that this agreement is a form of compulsory license because, as in most class action settlements, it applies to all members of the class who do not opt out by a certain date. The reality is that rights holders can at any time set pricing and access rights for their works or withdraw them from Google Books altogether. For those books whose rights holders have not yet come forward, reasonable default pricing and access policies are assumed. This allows access to the many orphan works whose owners have not yet been found and accumulates revenue for the rights holders, giving them an incentive to step forward.

"Others have questioned the impact of the agreement on competition, or asserted that it would limit consumer choice with respect to out-of-print books. In reality, nothing in this agreement precludes any other company or organization from pursuing their own similar effort. The agreement limits consumer choice in out-of-print books about as much as it limits consumer choice in unicorns. Today, if you want to access a typical out-of-print book, you have only one choice - fly to one of a handful of leading libraries in the country and hope to find it in the stacks." (http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/09/opinion/09brin.html?scp=2&sq=sergey%20brin&st=cse, accessed 10-09-2009).

The Amazon Kindle was hacked, allowing for all purchased content to be transferred off the device via a PDF file. 

"Kindle e-books are sold as .AZW files which have DRM that stops users from transferring the purchased books to other devices that are not Kindles.

"That should no longer be a problem thanks to Israeli hacker "Labba" who has cracked the DRM. A second hacker, 'I <3 cabbages,' has released the 'Unswindle' program, which will reformat digital content downloaded and stored on the Kindle for PC app, converting it to easily movable formats, such as PDF.

" 'Cabbages' did note that Amazon's DRM process was tough to crack, although ultimately Amazon's work was in vain. 'Amazon actually put a bit of effort behind the DRM obfuscation in their Kindle for PC application. And they seem to have done a reasonable job on the obfuscation. Way to go Amazon! It's good enough that I got bored unwinding it all and just got lazy with the Windows debugging APIs instead,' he said" (http://www.afterdawn.com/news/archive/20989.cfm#comments, accessed 01-02-2010).

Amusingly perhaps, or following the belief that all publicity is good publicity, Amazon.com had two advertisements for the Kindle on the web page publishing the above story.

In October 2010 Kevin Systrom and Cheyenne Foster launched Instagram, an online photo-sharing and social networking service that enabled users to take a picture, apply a digital filter to it, and share on a variety of networking services, including its own. Instagram was purchased in April 2012 by Facebook for approximately $1 billion in cash and stock.  After regulatory approval the deal closed in September 2012 by which time Instagram had over 100 million users. 

"On December 17, 2012, Instagram updated its Terms of Service to allow Instagram the right to sell users' photos to third parties without notification or compensation after January 16, 2013. The criticism from privacy advocates, consumers and even National Geographic which suspended its Instagram account, prompted Instagram to issue a statement retracting the controversial terms. Instagram is currently working on developing new language to replace the disputed terms of use" (Wikipedia article on Instagram, accessed 12-22-2012).

John G. Palfrey, Henry N. Ess III Professor of Law, Vice Dean, Library and Information Resources, Faculty Co-Director, Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard Law School, proposed a new digital legal information environment for the future.

In a lecture summary published in his blog Palfrey wrote: 

"I propose a path toward a new legal information environment that is predominantly digital in nature. This new era grows out of a long history of growth and change in the publishing of legal information over more than nine hundred years years, from the early manuscripts at the roots of English common law in the reign of the Angevin King Henry II; through the early printed treatises of Littleton and Coke in the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, (including those in the extraordinary collection of Henry N. Ess III); to the systemic improvements introduced by Blackstone in the late eighteenth century; to the modern period, ushered in by Langdell and West at the end of the nineteenth century. Now, we are embarking upon an equally ambitious venture to remake the legal information environment for the twenty-first century, in the digital era.  

"We should learn from advances in cloud computing, the digital naming systems, and youth media practices, as well as classical modes of librarianship, as we envision – and, together, build – a new system for recording, indexing, writing about, and teaching what we mean by the law. A new legal information environment, drawing comprehensively from contemporary technology, can improve access to justice by the traditionally disadvantaged, including persons with disabilities; enhance democracy; promote innovation and creativity in scholarship and teaching; and promote economic development. This new legal information architecture must be grounded in a reconceptualization of the public sector’s role and draw in private parties, such as Google, Amazon, Westlaw, and LexisNexis, as key intermediaries to legal information.  

"This new information environment will have unintended – and sometimes negative – consequences, too. This trajectory toward openness is likely to change the way that both professionals and the public view the law and the process of lawmaking. Hierarchies between those with specialized knowledge and power and those without will continue its erosion. Lawyers will have to rely upon an increasingly broad range of skills, rather than serving as gatekeepers to information, to command high wages, just as new gatekeepers emerge to play increasingly important roles in the legal process. The widespread availability of well-indexed digital copies of legal work-products will also affect the ways in which lawmakers of all types think and speak in ways that are hard to anticipate. One indirect effect of these changes, for instance, may be a greater receptivity on the part of lawmakers to calls for substantive information privacy rules for individuals in a digital age.  

"An effective new system will not emerge on its own; the digital environment, like the physical, is a built environment. As lawyers, teachers, researchers, and librarians, we share an interest in the way in which legal information is created, stored, accessed, manipulated, and preserved over the long term. We will have to work together to overcome several stumbling blocks, such as state-level assertions of copyright. As collaborators, we could design and develop it together over the next decade or so. The net result — if we get it right — will be improvements in the way we teach and learn about the law and how the system of justice functions" (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/palfrey/2010/11/09/henry-n-ess-iii-chair-lecture-notes/, accessed 12-10-2010).

In U.S. Federal Court in Oakland, California Oracle Corporation, based in Redwood Shores, California, won a $1,300,000,000 copyright infringement judgment against SAP AG, headquartered in Walldorf, Germany.

The judgment—an indication of the size and scale of the software industry— was a result of a lawsuit filed by Oracle in 2007 claiming that a unit of SAP U.S. made hundreds of thousands of illegal downloads and several thousand copies of Oracle’s software to avoid paying licensing fees, and in an attempt to steal customers. 

"The verdict, which came after one day of deliberations, is the biggest ever for copyright infringement and the largest U.S. jury award of 2010, according to Bloomberg data. The award is about equal to SAP’s forecasted net income for the fourth quarter, excluding some costs, according to the average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg. . . .

"The verdict is the 23rd-biggest jury award of all time, according to Bloomberg data. The largest jury award in a copyright-infringement case previously was $136 million verdict by a Los Angeles jury in 2002 in a Recording Industry Association of America lawsuit against Media Group Inc. for copying and distributing 1,500 songs by artists including Elvis Presley, Madonna and James Brown, according to Bloomberg data" (http://www.businessweek.com/news/2010-11-24/oracle-wins-1-3-billion-from-sap-in-downloading-case.html, accessed 11-24-2010).

On July 13, 2011, SAP filed a motion seeking judgment that actual damages should not be based on hypothetical licenses, and for a new trial for the amount of damages.

"On September 1, 2011, U.S. District Judge Phyllis Hamilton granted the judgment as a matter of law on the hypothetical license damages, and vacated the $1.3 billion award amount. In her ruling Judge Hamilton stated:

" 'Oracle’s suggestion – that upon proof of infringement, copyright plaintiffs are automatically entitled to seek “hypothetical” license damages because they are presumed to have suffered harm in the form of lost license fees – has no support in the law.'

"SAP's motion for a new trial was granted, conditioned on Oracle rejecting a remittitur of $272 million, the 'maximum amount of lost profits and infringer’s profits sustainable by the proof.' Judge Hamilton further stated:

" 'Determining a hypothetical license price requires an 'objective, not a subjective” analysis, and '[e]xcessively speculative' claims must be rejected.' " (Wikipedia article on Oracle Corporation v. SAP AG, accessed 04-24-2013).

The Universal Music Group, headquartered in Santa Monica, California, which traces its origins to 1898, donated its archive of recorded music, consisting of circa 200,000 metal, glass and lacquer master discs, recorded from 1926 to 1948, to the Library of Congress.  The agreement called for the Library of Congress to own and preserve the music and to convert it to digital form for usability and long-term data preservation. Universal Music Group retained the right to commercialize the digital files.

"Under the agreement negotiated during discussions that began two years ago the Library of Congress has been granted ownership of the physical discs and plans to preserve and digitize them. But Universal, a subsidiary of the French media conglomerate Vivendi that was formerly known as the Music Corporation of America, or MCA, retains both the copyright to the music recorded on the discs and the right to commercialize that music after it has been digitized.  

“The thinking behind this is that we have a very complementary relationship,” said Vinnie Freda, executive vice president for digital logistics and business services at Universal Music Logistics. “I’ve been trying to figure out a way to economically preserve these masters in a digital format, and the library is interested in making historically important material available. So they will preserve the physical masters for us and make them available to academics and anyone who goes to the library, and Universal retains the right to commercially exploit the masters.”  

"The agreement will also permit the Web site of the Library of Congress to stream some of the recordings for listeners around the world once they are cataloged and digitized, a process that Mr. DeAnna said could take five years or more, depending on government appropriations. But both sides said it had not yet been determined which songs would be made available, a process that could be complicated by Universal’s plans to sell some of the digitized material through iTunes.  

"Universal’s bequest is the second time in recent months that a historic archive of popular music has been handed over to a nonprofit institution dedicated to preserving America’s recorded musical heritage. Last spring the National Jazz Museum in Harlem acquired nearly 1,000 discs, transcribed from radio broadcasts in the late 1930s and early 1940s by the recording engineer William Savory, featuring some of the biggest names in jazz" (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/10/arts/music/10masters.html?hp, accessed 01-10-2011).

"Armies of Expensive Lawyers Replaced by Cheaper Software," an article by John Markoff published in The New York Times, discussed the use of "e-discovery" (ediscovery) software which uses artificial intelligence to analyze millions of electronic documents from the linguistic, conceptual and sociological standpoint in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of the hundreds of lawyers previously required to do the task.

"These new forms of automation have renewed the debate over the economic consequences of technological progress.  

"David H. Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the United States economy is being 'hollowed out.' New jobs, he says, are coming at the bottom of the economic pyramid, jobs in the middle are being lost to automation and outsourcing, and now job growth at the top is slowing because of automation.  

" 'There is no reason to think that technology creates unemployment,' Professor Autor said. 'Over the long run we find things for people to do. The harder question is, does changing technology always lead to better jobs? The answer is no.'

"Automation of higher-level jobs is accelerating because of progress in computer science and linguistics. Only recently have researchers been able to test and refine algorithms on vast data samples, including a huge trove of e-mail from the Enron Corporation. 

“ 'The economic impact will be huge,' said Tom Mitchell, chairman of the machine learning department at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. 'We’re at the beginning of a 10-year period where we’re going to transition from computers that can’t understand language to a point where computers can understand quite a bit about language.'

On August 15, 2011 Google announced that it agreed to acquire the smart-phone manufacturer Motorola Mobility, headquarted in Libertyville, Illinois, for $12,5 billion. This was Google's largest acquisition to date.

"In a statement, Google said the deal was largely driven by the need to acquire Motorola's patent portfolio, which it said would help it defend Android against legal threats from competitors armed with their own patents. This issue has come to the fore since a consortium of technology companies led by Apple and Microsoft purchased more than 6,000 mobile-device-related patents from Nortel Networks for about $4.5 billion, in early July. Battle lines are being drawn around patents, as companies seek to protect their interests in the competitive mobile industry through litigation as well as innovation.  

"However, as people increasingly access the Web via mobile devices, the acquisition could also help Google remain central to their Web experience in the years to come. As Apple has demonstrated with its wildly popular iPhone, this is far easier to achieve if a company can control the hardware, as well as the software, people carry in their pockets. Comments made by Google executives hint that Motorola could also play a role in shaping the future of the Web in other areas—for instance, in set-top boxes. Motorola is by far Google's largest acquisition, and it takes the company into uncertain new territory. The deal is also likely to draw antitrust scrutiny because of the reach Google already has with Android, which runs on around half of all smart phones in the United States.  

"Motorola, which makes the Droid smart phone, went all-in with Google's Android platform in 2008, declaring that all of its devices would use the open-source mobile operating system.  

"Before his departure as Google CEO, Eric Schmidt had begun pressing Google employees to shift their attention to mobile. Cofounder and new CEO Larry Page seems determined to maintain this change of focus. In a conference call this morning, he told investors, 'It's no secret that Web usage is increasingly shifting to mobile devices, a trend I expect to continue. With mobility continuing to take center stage in the computing revolution, the combination with Motorola is an extremely important event in Google's continuing evolution that will drive a lot of improvements in our ability to deliver great user experiences.' " (http://www.technologyreview.com/web/38320/?nlid=nldly&nld=2011-08-16, accessed 08-17-2011).

"AMONG the episodes in his life that didn’t last, that were over almost before they began, including a spell in the army and a try at marriage, Michael Hart was a street musician in San Francisco. He made no money at it, but then he never bought into the money system much—garage-sale T-shirts, canned beans for supper, were his sort of thing. He gave the music away for nothing because he believed it should be as freely available as the air you breathed, or as the wild blackberries and raspberries he used to gorge on, growing up, in the woods near Tacoma in Washington state. All good things should be abundant, and they should be free.  

"He came to apply that principle to books, too. Everyone should have access to the great works of the world, whether heavy (Shakespeare, 'Moby-Dick', pi to 1m places), or light (Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes, the 'Kama Sutra'). Everyone should have a free library of their own, the whole Library of Congress if they wanted, or some esoteric little subset; he liked Romanian poetry himself, and Herman Hesse’s 'Siddhartha'. The joy of e-books, which he invented, was that anyone could read those books anywhere, free, on any device, and every text could be replicated millions of times over. He dreamed that by 2021 he would have provided a million e-books each, a petabyte of information that could probably be held in one hand, to a billion people all over the globe—a quadrillion books, just given away. As powerful as the Bomb, but beneficial.

"That dream had grown from small beginnings: from him, a student at the University of Illinois in Urbana, hanging round a huge old mainframe computer on the night of the Fourth of July in 1971, with the sound of fireworks still in his ears. The engineers had given him by his reckoning $100m-worth of computer time, in those infant days of the internet. Wondering what to do, ferreting in his bag, he found a copy of the Declaration of Independence he had been given at the grocery store, and a light-bulb pinged on in his head. Slowly, on a 50-year-old Teletype machine with punched-paper tape, he began to bang out 'When in the Course of human events…'  

"This was the first free e-text, and none better as a declaration of freedom from the old-boy network of publishing. What he typed could not even be sent as an e-mail, in case it crashed the ancient Arpanet system; he had to send a message to say that it could be downloaded. Six people did, of perhaps 100 on the network. It was followed over years by the Gettysburg Address, the Constitution and the King James Bible, all arduously hand-typed, full of errors, by Mr Hart. No one particularly noticed. He mended people’s hi-fis to get by. Then from 1981, with a growing band of volunteer helpers scanning, rather than typing, a flood of e-texts gathered. By 2011 there were 33,000, accumulating at a rate of 200 a month, with translations into 60 languages, all given away free. No wonder money-oriented rivals such as Google and Yahoo! sprang up all round as the new century dawned, claiming to have invented e-books before him. He called his enterprise Project Gutenberg. This was partly because Gutenberg with his printing press had put wagonloads of books within the reach of people who had never read before; and also because printing had torn down the wall between haves and have-nots, literate and illiterate, rich and poor, until whole power-structures toppled. Mr Hart, for all his burly, hippy affability, was a cyber-revolutionary, with a snappy list of the effects he expected e-books to have:

Books prices plummet.

Literacy rates soar.

Education rates soar.

Old structures crumble, as did the Church.

Scientific Revolution.

Industrial Revolution.

Humanitarian Revolution.

"If all these upheavals were tardier than he hoped, it was because of the Mickey Mouse copyright laws. Every time men found a speedier way to spread information to each other, government made it illegal. During the lifetime of Project Gutenberg alone, the average time a book stayed in copyright in America rose from 30 to almost 100 years. Mr Hart tried to keep out of trouble, posting works that were safely in the public domain, but chafed at being unable to give away books that were new, and fought all copyright extensions like a tiger. “Unlimited distribution” was his mantra. Give everyone everything! Break the bars of ignorance down!

"The power of plain words

"He lived without a mobile phone, in a chaos of books and wiring. The computer hardware in his basement, from where he kept an unbossy watch over the whole project, often not bothering to pick up his monthly salary, was ten years old, and the software 20. Simple crowdsourcing was his management style, where people scanned or keyed in works they loved and sent them to him. Project Gutenberg books had a frugal look, with their Plain Vanilla ASCII format, which might have been produced on an old typewriter; but then it was content, not form, that mattered to Mr Hart. These were great thoughts, and he was sending them to people everywhere, available to read at the speed of light, and free as the air they breathed." (http://www.economist.com/node/21530075, accessed 09-27-2011).

♦ For another obituary of Michael Hart, of Urbana, Illinois, I recommend that in Brewster Kahle's Blog, post of September 7, 2011.

On January 17, 2012 Wikipedia went down and WordPress was dark to protest the potential passage of two bills under consideration by the U.S. Congress. The bills were known as the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House.

According to the Official Google Blog:

"♦ PIPA & SOPA will censor the web. These bills would grant new powers to law enforcement to filter the Internet and block access to tools to get around those filters. We know from experience that these powers are on the wish list of oppressive regimes throughout the world. SOPA and PIPA also eliminate due process. They provide incentives for American companies to shut down, block access to and stop servicing U.S. and foreign websites that copyright and trademark owners allege are illegal without any due process or ability of a wrongfully targeted website to seek restitution.

" ♦ PIPA & SOPA will risk our industry’s track record of innovation and job creation. These bills would make it easier to sue law-abiding U.S. companies. Law-abiding payment processors and Internet advertising services can be subject to these private rights of action. SOPA and PIPA would also create harmful (and uncertain) technology mandates on U.S. Internet companies, as federal judges second-guess technological measures used by these companies to stop bad actors, and potentially impose inconsistent injunctions on them.

" ♦ PIPA & SOPA will not stop piracy. These bills wouldn’t get rid of pirate sites. Pirate sites would just change their addresses in order to continue their criminal activities. There are better ways to address piracy than to ask U.S. companies to censor the Internet. The foreign rogue sites are in it for the money, and we believe the best way to shut them down is to cut off their sources of funding. As a result, Google supports alternative approaches like the OPEN Act" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/dont-censor-web.html, accessed 01-19-2012)

“ 'Amazon must be unbelievably happy today,' said Michael Norris, a book publishing analyst with Simba Information. 'Had they been puppeteering this whole play, it could not have worked out better for them.'

"Amazon, which already controls about 60 percent of the e-book market, can take a loss on every book it sells to gain market share for its Kindle devices. When it has enough competitive advantage, it can dictate its own terms, something publishers say is beginning to happen.  

"The online retailer declined to comment Wednesday beyond its statement about lowering prices. Asked last month if Amazon had been talking to the Justice Department about the investigation — a matter of intense speculation in the publishing industry — a spokesman, Craig Berman, said, 'I can’t comment.'  

"Traditional bookstores, which have been under pressure from the Internet for years, fear that the price gap between the physical books they sell and e-books from Amazon will now grow so wide they will lose what is left of their market. Barnes & Noble stores, whose Nook is one of the few popular e-readers that is not built by Amazon, could suffer the same fate, analysts say.  

“ 'To stay healthy, this industry needs a lot of retailers that have a stake in the future of the product,' Mr. Norris said. 'The bookstore up the street from my office is not trying to gain market share. They’re trying to make money by selling one book at a time to one person at a time.'

"Electronic books have been around for more than a decade, but took off only when Amazon introduced the first Kindle e-reader in 2007. It immediately built a commanding lead. The antitrust case had its origins in the leading publishers’ struggle to control the power of Amazon, which had one point had 90 percent of the market.  

"Apple’s introduction of the iPad in early 2010 seemed to offer a way to combat Amazon" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/business/media/amazon-to-cut-e-book-prices-shaking-rivals.html?_r=1&hp, accessed 04-12-2012).

"Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.  

"So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.  

"The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.  

"The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/technology/google-casts-a-big-shadow-on-smaller-web-sites.html?hpw, accessed 11-04-2012).

"WASHINGTON. The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a bill that would strengthen privacy protection for e-mails by requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant from a judge in most cases before gaining access to messages in individual accounts stored electronically.

"The bill is not expected to make it through Congress this year and will be the subject of negotiations next year with the Republican-led House. But the Senate panel’s approval was a first step toward an overhaul of a 1986 law that governs e-mail access and that is widely seen as outdated.  

"Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, was an architect of the 1986 law and is leading the effort to remake it. He said at the meeting on Thursday that e-mails stored by third parties should receive the same protection as papers stored in a filing cabinet in an individual's house.  " 'Like many Americans, I am concerned about the growing and unwelcome intrusions into our private lives in cyberspace,' Mr. Leahy said. 'I also understand that we must update our digital privacy laws to keep pace with the rapid advances in technology' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/technology/senate-committee-approves-stricter-privacy-for-e-mail.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fbusiness%2Findex.jsonp