Page:Copyright, Its History And Its Law (1912).djvu/160

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COPYRIGHT

portion of such copies or of the margin, back, permanent base, or pedestal, or of the substance on which such copies shall be mounted, his name shall appear. But in the case of works in which copyright is subsisting when this Act shall go into effect, the notice of copyright may be either in one of the forms prescribed herein or in one of those prescribed by the Act of June eighteenth, eighteen hundred and seventy-four."

Under the law of 1874, the prescribed notice was in the old form (Rev. Stat. 4962), "Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year , by A. B., in the office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington," with the optional alternative of the form " Copyright, 18 —, by A.B." Under the new code the latter form is preserved, with the alternative of the provision "Copr.," with date and name, but the longer form may be used on books copyrighted under the earlier acts, even if reprinted after the passage of the later act. Except for books previously copyrighted, the longer form is not now the legal notice, and its use would be dangerous, as it does not contain the specific word copyright, or its abbreviation, now made an obligatory part of the notice. While in Osgood v. Aloe in 1897, the omission of the name from the notice, though on the title-page, and in Record & Guide Co. v. Bromley in 1910, the omission of the date, though indicated by the date of the periodical in the line below, were held to void the copyright, such addition as the words "published by" has been held, as in Hills v. Hoover in 1905, a mere superfluity not voiding copyright.

The exact phraseology and order of words must be followed, and it has been held that any inaccuracy in the name of the copyright proprietor, as in the English case of Low v. Routledge, by Vice-Chancellor Kinders-