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4 translated pages

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OFFICIAL REPORTS

NATIONAL CONVENTION

FRENCH REPUBLIC

1792
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DECREE
OF THE NATIONAL CONVENTION,
of 19 July 1793,

the second year of the French Republic,

[regarding the property rights of authors to writings of
all kinds, of composers of music, of painters and illustrators]

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      THE NATIONAL CONVENTION,
having heard its Committee on Public Instruction,
decrees the following:

Article 1.
      Authors of writings of any kind, composers of music,
painters and draughtsmen who shall cause paintings and
drawings to be engraved, shall throughout their entire life
enjoy the exclusive right to sell, authorize for sale and
distribute their works in the territory of the Republic,
and to transfer that property in full or in part.

Article 2.
      Their heirs or transferees shall enjoy the same right
for a period of ten years following the death of the author.

Article 3.
      Officers of the peace shall be required

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to confiscate and requisition for the benefit of the
authors, composers, painters, draughtsmen and others concerned,
and of their heirs or transferees, all copies of
publications which have been printed or engraved without
the formal written permission of their authors.

Article 4.
      Counterfeiters shall be required to pay the true owner
of the work a sum equal to the cost of 3000 copies of the
original edition.

Article 5.
      Vendors of counterfeit editions who are nevertheless
not identified as counterfeiters themselves shall be required
to pay the true owner of the work a sum equal to the cost of
500 copies of the original edition.

Article 6.
      Any citizen who produces a work of literature or engraving,
of whatever genre, shall be required to deposit two copies with
the National Library or the Cabinet des Estampes of the Republic,
in return for a receipt signed by the library; those who fail to
do so shall not have standing to bring legal proceedings against
counterfeiters.

Article 7.
      The heirs of authors of works of literature or of engravings,
or of any other production of the mind or of genius

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within the domain of the fine arts, shall have
exclusive property in those works for a period
of ten years.

                                    Certified by the Inspector
                                          J. P. Monnet

                        Checked against the original document
                  by us, the President and Secretaries of the
                  National Convention. Paris, 24 July 1793, the
                  second year of the French Republic.

                              Jeanbon Saint-André,
                                                [Jacques-Alexis] Thuriot

                              [Jean-Nicolas] Billaud-Varenne
                                                [Robert] Lindet

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868

[Extract from the "Moniteur universel"
with Joseph Lakanal's report on the French Copyright Act]

[Middle column]

[...]

      Lakanal. Of all properties, the most incontestable, the one
whose increase is in no way injurious to Republican equality and
which gives no offence to liberty, is undeniably the property of
works of genius ; it is if anything surprising that it should have
proved necessary to recognize this property and to secure its free
exercise by a positive law, and that a great Revolution like ours
should have been required to return us, in this as in so many other
matters, to the simplest elements of common justice.
      Genius fashions in silence a work which pushes back the boundaries
of human knowledge: instantly, literary pirates seize it, and the
author must pass into immortality only through the horrors of poverty.
Ah! What of his children...? Citizens, the lineage of the great
Corneille sputtered out in indigence!
      Since printing is the only means whereby the author may make
useful exercise of his property, the fact of being printed alone cannot
make an author’s works public property, at least not in the way that
the literary buccaneers understand; for if it were so, it follows that
the author would be unable to make use of his property without losing
it in the same moment.
      What a cruel fate for a man of genius, who has dedicated his
waking hours to the instruction of his fellow citizens, to receive
only a sterile glory, and to be unable to claim the legitimate reward
of such noble labour.
      It is after careful deliberation that this Committee advises you
to create dedicated legislative provisions which will form, in a sense,
the Declaration of the Rights of Genius.

[...]



Translation by: Andrew Counter