Page:Federal Reporter, 1st Series, Volume 3.djvu/31

 24 ITEDEBAL EEPOETES, �property; and if the defendant's publication was copied di- reotly or indirectly from the plaintiff's chromos, and there was a subs.tantial identity in the design, the defendant was liable. �I see no reason to doubt the correctness of these instruc- tions. The sketch in the foreign publication was public prop- erty, which any person could rightfully reproduee. If the plaintif had obtained his copyright by appropriating this sketch, and recording the description, and complyiug with ■ the other formai requisites of the act of congress for obtain- ing a copyright, he would have acquired no exclusive right to it, because he would not have been the author, designer, or proprietor of the sketch. Assuming the plaintifï to have been the artist and designer of the picture copyrighted by him, the defendant was not liable if he did not avail himself, directly or indirectly, of the plaintiff's production. A copy- right secures the proprietor against the copying, by others, of the original work, but does not confer upon him a monopoly in the intellectual conception which it expresses. An artist cannot acquire such an exclusive right to the conception em- bodied and expressed in his picture as to preclude others from the exercise of their own creative genius or artistic skill, or from availing themselves of any part of the genial con- tribution of artistic production. �The law of copyright originated in the recognition of the right of another to be protected in the manuscript which is the title of his literary property. This protection could not be adequate unless he was invested with the exclusive privi- lege of copying the manuscript, whether for sale or for pub- lication. It does not rest upon any theory that the author has an exclusive property in his ideas, or in the words in wMch he has clothed them. If each of two persons should compose a poem identically alike, he who first composed it would have no priority of title over the other, nor would he acquire priority by first publishing ifc. The law of copyright would protect each in hia own manuscript, but would not prevent either from nsing his own. �An illustration in point is used by Judge Story in Emerson ����