Zur Geschichte des Frankfurter »Entwurfs eines deutschen Gesetzes zum Schutze der Urheberrechte an literarischen Erzeugnissen und Werken der Kunst«
On the History of the Frankfurt Draft of a German Law for the Protection of Copyright in Literary Products and Works of Art /»Frankfurter Entwurf«/

Summary/Abstract: The fight against pirate printing (»Nachdruck«) was one of the unresolved issues of the Congress of Vienna in 1815. Even after the founding of the German Confederation, the safeguarding of an intellectual achievement was and remained effectively left to the numerous individual German states, which pursued completely different political and economic interests in this area. With the dissolution of the German Confederation in the summer of 1866, the decades-long effort to create uniform legislation to protect copyrights in Germany also failed. Until the end, it was not possible to replace the more than thirty Land laws against reprinting, some of which differed greatly from one another, with a single standard. Based on the files of the Berlin Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation, this article traces the first and last attempt to enact a comprehensive German copyright law in the 1860s. It describes the voting process on the bill passed in September 1864 for a »law to protect copyrights to literary products and works of art« and names the reasons for its predictable failure.

• Details
• Contents