Copyright law has taken a 300 year path to arrive where it is today, starting with the Statue of Anne (1710) in Great Britain. The most recent alteration to our current copyright law was in 1976 when copyright was changed to be granted on creation rather than registration, and was extended to included the life of the author plus 50 years. This is all covered in an article recently published by Meredith McGill in the journal The Scoiety for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing titled “Copyright and Intellectual Property: The State of the Disciple.”
