Copyright Law of France - History

History

Further information: History of copyright law

The concept of "right of the author", which differs from Anglo-American copyright, finds its roots in the practice of printing patents and royal privileges, which first appeared in the 16th century and became common in the 17th century. The privilege concerned the publication rights to authors' works, rather than authors' rights per se. The first privilege granted in France was given by Henri II in 1551 to Guillaume Morlay, his luth player. Through this system of royal privileges, the King granted monopolies to specific editors, and implemented a system of censorship. Privileges were then very short (3 to 10 years), after which the work entered the public domain. The Moulins ordinance of 1566, the first piece of legislation to impose to librarians and editors the request of a printing patent, did not make any mention of authors.

Despite this regime which privileged editors over authors, some of the latter succeeded in obtaining privileges for their works. During the Muret Affair, in 1568, the lawyer Marion pleaded for a complete and unrestricted right of property of the author on his work, and intellectual property thus entered the French jurisprudence.

At the same time, the practice of remunerating authors by some percentage became common during the 17th century. Playwrights, including Corneille, started to defend their rights because at that time, once a play was published, any troupe could play it without paying anything to its creator. The King thus arbitrated between the rival interests of editors and creators, giving his preference to the former.

In 1761, a court decision granted to Jean de La Fontaine's granddaughters the right of ownership of La Fontaine's work, legitimized by the right of inheritance. In 1777, two other court decisions limited the publisher's right, which was restricted to the life-time of the author.

Following the abolition of privileges on the night of 4 August 1789, during the French Revolution, the National Convention enacted new legislation on the matter. A draft law was proposed by the Abbé Sieyès, which, although allegedly inspired by Condorcet's pamphlet titled Fragments sur la liberté de la presse (Fragments on liberty of the press, 1776), aimed at struggling against the spread of licentious ideas by imposing responsibility for their diffusion on authors, publishers and librarians. Sieyès and Condorcet also advanced the idea of "limited privilege," against perpetual privileges, thus preparing the inclusion in the public domain of the works of Racine, Molière, Rousseau, Voltaire, etc. According to Anne Latournerie, "The first revolutionary attempt to provide to authors a legal recognition of their rights on their texts was therefore not the search of a freedom for authors, but rather the exigency of a responsibility."

Finally, after a controversy concerning dramatic authors, and their rebellion, led by Beaumarchais, these preliminaries resulted in the July 19, 1793 Chénier Act. The July 14, 1866 Act extends the rights until fifty years after the death of the author.

Debates continued throughout the 19th century - notably, between Lamartine and Proudhon - and the inter-war period. As early as August 1936 during the Popular Front, the Minister of National Education and of the Beaux-Arts Jean Zay proposed a draft law based on a new philosophy of the author as an "intellectual worker" (travailleur intellectuel) rather than as an "owner" (propriétaire). Jean Zay placed himself in a moral continuum with Alfred de Vigny, Augustin-Charles Renouard and Proudhon, defending the "spiritual interest of the collectivity". Article 21 of his draft divided the 50 years post-mortem protection period into two different phases, one of 10 years and the other of 40 years which established a sort of legal licence suppressing the right of exclusivity granted to a specific editor. Zay's draft project was particularly opposed by the editor Bernard Grasset, who defended the right of the editor as a "creator of value", while many writers, including Jules Romains and the president of the Société des Gens de Lettres, Jean Vignaud, supported Zay's draft. The draft did not succeed, however, in being voted in before the end of the legislature in 1939.

New discussions were undertaken during the Vichy regime, initiated by a corporatist body, presided over by three jurists, François Hepp, René Dommange, and Paul Lerebours-Pigeonnières. Both Hepp and Dommange had been at the forefront of the battle against Jean Zay's draft law during the Popular Front.

During the Fourth Republic, 13 years of debate culminated in the modernization of the law with the March 11, 1957 Act, which was in the mold of the Vichy proposals — a continuity proudly highlighted by François Hepp. A Commission had been created in August 1944, presided over by the jurist Jean Escarra, who had co-signed in 1937 an essay with François Hepp and Jean Reault, published by Grasset, which harshly criticized Jean Zay's draft project.

In 1997, a court decision outlawed the publication on the Internet of Raymond Queneau's Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, an interactive poem or sort of machine to produce poems. The court decided that the son of Queneau and the Gallimard editions possessed an exclusive and moral right on this poem, thus outlawing any publication of it on the Internet and possibility for the reader to play Queneau's interactive game of poem construction.

In March 2006, the controversial DADVSI Act, which implements - including modifications - the 2001 EU Copyright directive will be voted on by the National Parliament.