Duration and Renewal

• Author: Robert A. Gorman
• Profession: University of Virginia School of Law
• Pages: 37

The Copyright Clause of the Constitution empowers Congress to grant exclusive rights to authors, "for limited times." The first United States Copyright Act, enacted in 1790, was patterned on the Statute of Anne and gave authors a fourteen-year period of protection for published works and a right to renew the copyright for fourteen more years if the author was alive at the end of the first term. The renewal format, with two rather short terms of protection, was a feature of our copyright law through 1977. The 1909 Copyright Act granted an initial term of protection for twenty-eight years and a renewal term of another twenty-eight years upon timely registration by the author or by certain designated statutory successors. Under the 1909 Act, an author of an unpublished work could invoke state common-law copyright protection indefinitely until the work was ",,-.iblished" (a term of art to be discussed in Chapter 5 at pp. 58-61); for most unpublished works, the author had the option to secure federal copyright protection by registering the work with the Copyright Office. For published works, common-law copyright was preempted and protection could be secured only by compliance with the formalities of the federal act.

With the 1976 Copyright Act, effective January 1, 1978, both the starting point and ending point of federal copyright protection have changed.

As already noted, copyright attaches as soon as a work is...