COPYRIGHT
Its History and Its Law
I
The Nature and Origin of Copyright
Copyright,
meaningCopyright (from the Latin copia, plenty) means, in general, the right to copy, to make plenty. In its specific application it means the right to multiply copies of those products of the human brain known as literature and art.
There is another legal sense of the word "copyright" much emphasized by several English justices. Through the low Latin use of the word copia, our word "copy" has a secondary and reversed meaning, as the pattern to be copied or made plenty, in which sense the schoolboy copies from the "copy" set in his copy-book, and the modern printer calls for the author's "copy."
Its two
sensesCopyright, accordingly, may also mean the right its in copy made (whether the original work or a duplication of it), as well as the right to make copies, which by no means goes with the work or any duplicate of it. Said Lord St. Leonards in the case of Jefferys v. Boosey in 1854: "When we are talking of the right of an author we must distinguish between the mere right to his manuscript, and to any copy which he may choose to make of it, as his property, just like any other personal chattel, and the right to multiply copies to the exclusion of every other person. Nothing can be more distinct than these two
