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Suthersanen, Uma --- "Bleak House or Great Expectations? The Literary Author as a Stakeholder in Nineteenth-Century International Copyright Politics" [2006] ELECD 100; in Porsdam, Helle (ed), "Copyright and Other Fairy Tales" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006)

Book Title: Copyright and Other Fairy Tales

Editor(s): Porsdam, Helle

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

ISBN (hard cover): 9781845426019

Section: Chapter 3

Section Title: Bleak House or Great Expectations? The Literary Author as a Stakeholder in Nineteenth-Century International Copyright Politics

Author(s): Suthersanen, Uma

Number of pages: 21

Extract:

3. Bleak House or Great Expectations?
The literary author as a stakeholder
in nineteenth-century international
copyright politics
Uma Suthersanen
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was a far, far better copyright
treaty than any the world had ever attempted before. It began with Great
Expectations; by the end, the participants felt, if not quite like Les Misérables, at
least as if they had emerged from a Bleak House. What the dickens was it? It was
the Diplomatic Conference on Certain Copyright and Neighboring Rights
Questions, convened at Geneva, Switzerland, from December 2 through 20, 1996.1

It is a well-accepted tenet in the twentieth century that authors deserve protec-
tion against all forms of misappropriation of their works, and that stand-alone
international copyright treaties are one of the best means of achieving world-
wide protection.2 This argument began in the nineteenth century, a century
which saw, perhaps not uncoincidentally, the genesis of international copy-
right law. The virtual disappearance of the author in twenty-first-century copy-
right discourse contrasts sharply with the rise of the author in the early
nineteenth century as exemplified by the two most recent international copy-
right treaties adopted at the conference mentioned in the above quote.
Whilst the eighteenth century can be viewed as the era which saw the end
of patronage, especially in Britain, and the rise of the middle classes and the
`common man', the nineteenth century saw authors and ...