2011]
INVENTIONS MADE FOR HIRE
21
publisher—would be entitled to the copyrights in his work, even though his status as an employee was uncertain at best. 69 Later cases in the antebellum era involved school books, 70 theatrical works, 71 and cartography. 72 What is particularly interesting about this period of time is the courts’ clear pro-employee stance. In later decades, courts’ rhetoric would be inconsistent with the holdings of their decisions. While courts would claim to celebrate the genius and romanticism of the independent author, they would simultaneously grant first publishing houses and later employers the rights to that labor. During the antebellum nineteenth century, however, courts’ rhetoric praising the individual was consistent with the holdings of their decisions, which largely gave employees ownership of the copyrights in their works. The only cases where employers were held to have been granted copyrights in their employees’ works involved expressed contracts and cartography which, by its very nature, requires coordination among various individuals. True, smaller scale maps could be created by one person on their own, but for anything of a greater scale, coordination among various parties would be required. B. The Nineteenth Century Postbellum In the period during and after the American Civil War, courts began to hold that employers had been granted copyrights in their employees’ works, not by operation of contract, but based on the employment relationship. Particularly important to the discussion in Part III is that while cases originally held that the 69
See Fisk, supra note 64, at 16–18 (discussing early American legal publishing and the status of legal reporters, who were hired by the courts as independent contractors—although not called that—and encouraged to find publishers for their work by selling their copyrights). Fisk believes that the fact that early cases involved case reporters who, like Wheaton vis-à-vis the United States Supreme Court, had relationships with the judges likely deciding these cases, likely influenced their outcome. See id. at 21. The reporters were not traditional employees, but rather important and well-educated men who had agreed to perform a function that that was essential to the profession. See id. 70 See Pierpont v. Fowle, 19 F. Cas. 652 (C.C.D. Mass. 1846) (holding that the renewal rights in a copyrighted work are not included in an assignment of the initial copyrights). 71 See Atwill v. Ferrett, 2 F. Cas. 195 (1846) (holding that an author commissioned to create an opera remained the author of the work, but that an involved theater manager retained copyright in the version performed in his theater). 72 See Pennsylvania v. Desilver, 3 Phila. 31 (C.P. 1858) (holding that the state employing a coordinating cartographer held the copyrights in his work); Heine v. Appleton, 11 F. Cas. 1031 (C.C.S.D.N.Y. 1857) (holding that an artist that had participated in a government funded expedition could not enjoin publication of books containing his illustrations, because he had expressly agreed otherwise and he had been paid to alter the images for that very purpose).