Open this publication in new window or tab >>2023 (English)In: Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900)Article in journal, Editorial material (Other academic) Published
Abstract [en]
For most of the 19th century Swedish copyright law was primarily regulated by the Freedom of the Press Ordinance of 1812, which merely stated that ‘Any writing is the property of the author or its legal proprietor’. It was not until 1877 that Sweden passed a separate, comprehensive copyright law. This was initially motivated by the fact that copyright was becoming much too extensive and complicated an issue to be regulated in a constitutional law. Apart from addressing many of the practicalities surrounding the exchange and sale of literary rights, the 1877 Copyright Act also introduced two important novelties in Swedish copyright law. First, it imposed a fixed time limitation on the protection of copyright; while the previous law had, in practice, allowed for an eternal extension of copyright protection, the new act limited this to 50 years after the death of the author. Secondly, the 1877 Copyright Act provided a certain, although very limited, copyright protection for translated works stating that original authors retained their copyright for works translated from Swedish into Norwegian or Danish. This was the most controversial part of the new law as many publishers saw this as a limitation of what they thought of as their ‘freedom to translate’ which, they argued, could limit public access to literature.
Keywords
Copyright History
National Category
History
Identifiers
urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-198791 (URN)
Note
Please cite as: Fredriksson, Martin (2023) ‘Commentary on The Swedish Copyright Act (1877)’, in Primary Sources on Copyright (1450-1900), eds L. Bently & M. Kretschmer, www.copyrighthistory.org
2023-10-282023-10-282023-11-08Bibliographically approved