Der Kabin Von Onkle Tom

Until the late nineteenth century, when the concept of copyright began to be extended to ‘the substance and not the form alone’, American law defined ‘copying’ very narrowly. In 1853, a federal circuit judge rejected Harriet Beecher Stowe’s allegation that a German translation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin had infringed her copyright.

‘By the publication of Mrs Stowe’s book,’ he ruled, ‘the creations of the genius and imagination of the author have become as much public property as those of Homer or Cervantes... All her conceptions and inventions may be used and abused by imitators, playwrights and poetasters... A translation may, in loose phraseology, be called a transcript or copy of her thoughts, but in no correct sense can it be called a copy of her book.’