Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act
The best resource for the history of copyright law
This collection contains all of the significant materials leading to the Copyright Act of 1909. Many of these documents were never distributed on a wide basis, and some were never officially published. Hence, this set’s value to the legal research community.
Under the 1909 Act, federal statutory copyright protection attached to the original works only when the titles were published and had a notice of copyright affixed. Therefore state copyright law governed protection for unpublished works, but published titles, whether they had a notice of copyright or not, were governed only by federal law.