the status quo, which, on the whole, afforded a fairly satisfactory protection throughout the British dominions.
It was thus that matters drifted until 1908, when the Berne Convention was revised at Berlin. Great strides had been made in copyright legislation on the Continent since the last revision of the Convention at Paris in 1896, and matters were now ripe for an international agreement very much in advance of the original Berne Convention. The British delegates accordingly signed a treaty which demanded in many respects a larger protection for authors and artists than was accorded by English law. It became obvious that if the revised Convention was to be ratified by Great Britain, substantial alterations would have to be made in our domestic legislation. The position was carefully considered by a Departmental Committee of the Board of Trade under the presidency of Lord Gorell, and the Committee in substance approved of the terms of the Revised Convention, and recommended that it should be ratified and that legislation should be passed to give effect to it in this country.
In order to solve the long-standing difficulty with the self-governing dominions, the opportunity was taken of calling together a subsidiary Copyright Conference of the Colonial delegates who came to attend the Imperial Conference in the summer of 1910. This Conference passed resolutions giving general approval of the Revised Convention, and recommending an Imperial Copyright Act which should apply to the whole of the British Empire, but at the same time make the adoption of the Act optional in the self-governing dominions. The self-governing dominions were to have an absolutely free hand, each in its own dominion, but provision was to be made that if any self-governing dominion did not afford satisfactory protection to the works of British subjects resident elsewhere, then the residents in that dominion might be excluded from the enjoyment of Imperial copyright.
It was upon this basis that the Bill was drafted and the Act passed.
The principal changes which the Act will effect upon the existing law may be briefly summarised—
- Extension of the term of copyright to life and fifty years (Subject to certain exceptions).
- Provision that the last twenty-five years of the term of copyright shall be unassignable by the author during his lifetime.
- Provision that during the last twenty-five years any person may reproduce a work without consent on payment of a ten per cent royalty.
