Page:Copyright, Its History And Its Law (1912).djvu/42

 libraires jurés or legalized booksellers, under regula-tion of the University, as a body of publishers and writers having jurisdiction over the copying and censorship of manuscripts. "Letters of patent" of Charles V, 1368, specified fourteen libraires and eleven écrivains as registered in Paris, and four chief libraires had jurisdiction over the calling of the librarius and the stationarius. The certificate of the correctness of a copy, and perhaps of the right to copy or sell it, may be considered the primitive form of copyright certificate.

The invention of printing, prior to 1450, made pro-printing tection of literary property a question of rapidly in- creasing importance. The new art raised, of course, many new questions wherever the guardians of the law were set to their chronic task of applying old ideas of right to new conditions. The earliest copy- right certificate, if it may be so called, in a printed book was that in the re-issue of the tractate of Peter Nigrus printed in 1475, at Esslingen, in which the Bishop of Ratisbon certified the correctness of the copy and his approval. At first "privileges" were granted chiefly to printers, for the reproduction of classic or patristic works, but possibly in some cases as the representatives of living writers ; and there are early instances of direct grants to authors, the earliest known being in i486 in Venice to Sabellico.

In Germany, the cradle of the art of printing, whence come the earliest incunabula or cradle-books, printing privileges were developed some decades later than in Italy. Koberger, the early Nuremberg printer, whose imprint dates back to 1 473, relied rather on the "courtesy of the trade," and indeed made an agreement in 1495 with Kessler of Basel to respect each other's rights. Yet a suit brought in 1480 by Schöffer, who with Fust had established the first