Will Slauter (Université Paris Diderot – Institut universitaire de France): News, Newspapers, and the Limits of Copyright in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Will Slauter (Université Paris Diderot – Institut universitaire de France)

Title: News, Newspapers, and the Limits of Copyright in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Abstract

The history of copyright in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has tended to focus on books, but newspapers followed a different trajectory and challenged existing legal frameworks in the United Kingdom and the United States. Drawing on research for my book “Who Owns the News?” as well as my experience coordinating a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review on copying and copyright, this presentation will explore some of the conceptual and practical problems faced by those who sought to enjoy exclusive rights in contributions to newspapers and other periodicals. Not all complaints about copying or imitation led to court cases or legislative lobbying, but those that did tended to spark debates on the purpose and appropriate boundaries of copyright law. Other disputes led to public shaming or exchanges about what was fair and customary. Exploring this history is useful for thinking about the relationship between publishing practice and the law at different moments in the past, but also for understanding some of the reasons that newspapers—and news reports in particular—have long been treated differently than other genres of writing protected by copyright.

Biography

Will Slauter teaches at Université Paris Diderot and is a member of the Institut universitaire de France. He studies the history of publishing, with a particular interest in newspapers. He is the author of Who Owns the News? A History of Copyright (Stanford, 2019) and coordinator of a special issue of Victorian Periodicals Review (Dec. 2018) on the relationship between copyright law and publishing practice in the nineteenth-century periodical press. With Marie-Stéphanie Delamaire of the Winterthur Museum he is leading a collaborative project on copyright and the circulation of images during the long nineteenth century, in both Great Britain and the United States.