102 Literary Properly and International Copyright. 



Finally, the fabric of property rights was completed and crowned 

 by the doctrine that no man can be deprived of his property, except 

 by authority of law, without his consent. 



Thus, gradually advancing slowly step by step as the exigencies of 

 society demanded and enlightened reason dictated, grew up the en- 

 lightened and just system of rules and principles which now constitute 

 the law of property. First, the intuitive idea of the right of property, 

 the natural right of man to exercise dominion over external things; 

 second, the exclusive right of the individual to the use of a thing or 

 subject of property while in possession ; third, exclusive right not 

 only to the use but to the substance of the thing ; fourth, the right of 

 transferring both the use and substance from one person to another; 

 and, fifth, the doctrine that a man cannot be deprived of his property, 

 except by authority of law, without his consent. 



Thus much has been said - and perhaps more than was necessary — 

 to clear the way for an intelligent discussion of literary property. 



And what is literary property? No better definition can be formu- 

 lated than that furnished by Mr. Drone in his excellent treatise on 

 Copyright. "Literary property," he says, " is the exclusive right of 

 the owner to possess, use and dispose of intellectual productions. An 

 intellectual creation without material form may exist in the mind of 

 the author. But it is only when embodied in written or spoken lan- 

 guage that it can possess the attributes of property ; for it is onlv by 

 language that it can have any being out of the author's mind, that it 

 can be enjoyed by others, that it can be identified. There can, then, 

 be no property in a production of the mind unless it is expressed in a 

 definite order of words. But the property is not in the mere words 

 alone — not alone in the form of expression chosen by the author. It 

 is in the intellectual creation, which language is merely a means of 

 expressing and communicating." 



As the term copyright is often used synonymously with literary 

 property, and indifferently to signify both the common law and the 

 statutory right of the author in a literary composition, it should be 

 noted that there is an essential difference between the two rights. 



The common-law right is the right or property of an author in his 

 brain work before publication, and may appropriately be termed common- 

 law copyright, it being a natural right wholly independent of statute, 

 which is recognized and protected by the common law. The statutory 

 right is the right of an author in his literary work after publication, 

 and may properly be characterized as statutory copyright. It is the 

 exclusive right of the owner to multiply, and to dispose of copies of an' 

 intellectual production — a right secured by statute. 



