Copyright Act of 1870


The Copyright Act of 1870, also called the Patent Act of 1870 and the Trade Mark Act of 1870, was a revision to United States intellectual property law, covering copyrights and patents. Eight sections of the bill, sometimes called the Trade Mark Act of 1870, introduced trademarks to United States federal law, although that portion was later deemed unconstitutional after the Trade-Mark Cases.

Copyright

For copyrights, the Act codified the right of authors to make dramatizations and translations of literary works; copyright had previously been denied to translations by the holding in Stowe v. Thomas, in which Harriet Beecher Stowe unsuccessfully sued for infringement over a translation of Uncle Tom's Cabin into German. It also established a legal deposit requirement for copyrighted works; two copies of each work were to be submitted to the Library of Congress.

Copyright amendments

The act was amended several times for various purposes.
The Act reorganized the United States Patent Office, and strengthened the authority of the Patent Office to determine who would be granted a patent in cases where there was a dispute between the first to invent and the first to file. It also empowered the Patent Office to begin printing, and dropped the requirement that applicants submit two copies of their applications.

Trademarks

Sections 77 through 84 represented the first attempt by the United States of formally recognizing trademarks. Its presence in the Copyright Act lead to significant confusion and confounding of the copyright and trademark concepts. For example, Mark Twain, an author who treated that pseudonym as a brand, began asserting copyright in that pseudonym and sued several people for copyright and trademark infringement, mostly unsuccessfully. Ultimately, the Trade-Mark Cases of 1879 ruled this portion of the law unconstitutional because Congress had used invoked the Copyright Clause as their justification for trademark by including it in the Copyright Act. The Supreme Court determined that was inappropriate because "a trade-mark is neither an invention, a discovery, nor a writing, within the meaning of ." Congress passed the Trade Mark Act of 1881 to reintroduce trademarks, justified by the Commerce Clause instead.