life plus eighty in the U.S.?

In the case of Sociedad de Autores Espanoles v. Marin, 4 Porto Rico Fed. Rep. 288 (D. P. R., 1908) Judge Bernard S. Rodey heard a complaint by the SAE against a company of performers who were performing a number of works, copyrighted in Spain, without license. Judge Rodey ruled that, as the Spanish copyrights were in force in Puerto Rico on April 11, 1899 (the date of the treaty ending the U.S.-Spanish war) then by the terms of that treaty the copyrights must be upheld by the U.S. courts. The judge noted, however,

     We are somewhat troubled, after an exami-
     nation of this Spanish copyright law, because
     we find that it gives a copyright to an
     author for his entire lifetime, and to his
     heirs for eighty years thereafter, provided
     a new edition or copy of the work is published
     as often as once in twenty years; otherwise it
     becomes public property.
     
     We find that our own copyright law, 2 Fed. Stat. 
     Anno. 260, has life for only twenty-eight years
     to the author, and fourteen years to his family;
     and we wonder whether the language of the
     treaty, above quoted, is intended to give this
     much longer term to Spanish copyrights in
     Porto Rico.

He obviously means, "the much longer Spanish term", not that the U.S. term is longer than the Spanish. He went on to say

     This decision may be of such far-reaching 
     importance as that we feel, in justice to
     our government, a copy of the same should
     be certified by the clerk to the Honorable
     the Attorney General ofthe United States,
     so that, if he shall deem proper, he may
     cause the United States attorney for the 
     island to take an appeal to the Supreme
     Court of the United States.

I know of no statement of the Attorney General concerning copyright law in Puerto Rico. There a some opinions of the A.G. involving the Philippines, but they don't address the issue raised in SAE v. Marin.

My own hunch is that the question was settled by the passage of the Copyright Act of 1909, according to which all works published prior to July 1, 1909 were put into the public domain unless they had a valid U.S. copyright on that date, in which latter case they presumably were regulated by the Act. The term for the Spanish copyrights in Puerto Rico would than have been 56 years maximum from initial publication.

Does anyone know of other case law involving foreign copyrights which came under U.S. jurisdiction due to annexation of territory?

Tim Phillips
<hrothgar[_at_]telepath.com> Received on Tue Feb 23 1999 - 15:50:25 GMT