This website, initially funded by the United Kingdom Arts and Humanities Council, uses primary source material from Italy, France, Germany, the UK, and the United States to trace the beginnings of copyright. For each of these geographical zones/jurisdictions, a national editor was responsible for "selecting, sourcing, transcribing, translating and commenting documents." Documents found here...
This site is dedicated to copyright law and the national copyright system and has a lot to offer. For starters, the "Biographies of the Registers of Copyrights" is a real pip, as it contains profiles of the individuals who have served in this key government position since the days of Thorvald Solberg, who assumed the office in 1897 and served until 1930. The site also contains more wordy and...