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‘MERELY MECHANICAL’: ON THE ORIGINS OF PHOTOGRAPHIC COPYRIGHT IN FRANCE AND GREAT BRITAIN
Author(s) -
MCCAULEY ANNE
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
art history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.1
H-Index - 19
eISSN - 1467-8365
pISSN - 0141-6790
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-8365.2008.00583.x
Subject(s) - copyright law , extant taxon , photography , commercialization , statutory law , the arts , visual arts , originality , law , fine art , copyright act , art , history , political science , intellectual property , evolutionary biology , creativity , biology
The invention of the medium of photography and its commercialization as a cheap multiple during the 1850s and 1860s led to challenges to extant copyright laws in France and Great Britain. This paper traces the ways that debates over photographic copyright confronted current understandings of originality and mechanization and repeated arguments that had already been raised by laws governing prints and casts. The British Fine Arts Copyright Act of 1862, which extended statutory protection to all photographs, is contrasted with French cases, which struggled to accommodate photographs within the fine arts as defined by the copyright law of 1793.