Trading With The Enemies Act

 The 1798 Alien Enemies Act is much in the news.  That Act, now in 50 USC Chapter 3, begins:

Whenever there is a declared war between the United States and any foreign nation or government, or any invasion or predatory incursion is perpetrated, attempted, or threatened against the territory of the United States by any foreign nation or government, and the President makes public proclamation of the event, all natives, citizens, denizens, or subjects of the hostile nation or government, being of the age of fourteen years and upward, who shall be within the United States and not actually naturalized, shall be liable to be apprehended, restrained, secured, and removed as alien enemies. 

Nothing in there about copyright of course, but there is a history in the U.S. of expropriation of other country's citizens intellectual property during war. On October 6, 1917, President Woodrow Wilson approved the Trading with the Enemy Act, Pub. L. No. 65-91, 65th Cong., 1st Sess., 40 Stat. 411. This Act permitted U.S. citizens or corporations to apply to the President for a license (exclusive or nonexclusive) to use enemy copyrights, patents or trademarks within the United States.

Other provisions permitted the government to seize title to the intellectual property of enemy authors.  An Office of the Alien Property Custodian, in the Justice Department, was set up for this purpose and issued numerous vesting orders pursuant to which enemy copyrights were seized. Although the Office of the Alien Property Custodian was abolished in 1934, the Office was reestablished under the First War Powers Act following the declaration of war on Japan, Germany, Italy, Romania, Bulgaria, and Hungary in 1941. Section 10 of the 1917 Act remained in effect.

The Alien Property Custodian was quite active during World War II, and the numerous vesting orders recorded in the Copyright Office caused the Office considerable work. By fiscal year 1944, 185,102 titles had been recorded, with 146,690 waiting to be indexed. Royalties of $5 million were collected and deposited with the U.S. Treasury from the exploitation of musical works such as Puccini operas, books such as Mein Kampf and Goebbels's diaries, and films such as The Blue Angel. Approximately 700 scientific books and 3,200 issues of foreign scientific periodicals were licensed under the orders.

After the conclusion of World War II, the War Claims Act of 1948 was passed. This Act provided, inter alia, for the satisfaction of U.S. war claims from funds obtained from the sale or licensing of seized intellectual property. At the same time, title to copyright was returned to the rightful foreign author or his or her heirs in a number of cases.

 In the 1994 GATT implementing legislation, an exception from restoration pursuant to Section 104A(a)(2) is provided for “Any work in which the copyright was ever owned or administered by the Alien Property Custodian and in which the restored work would be owned by a government or instrumentality thereof … . ” The purpose of this exception is to ensure that the German and Japanese governments do not receive protection for their wartime works. It does not effect restoration by individuals from those countries. 

Perhaps more relevant now is not expropriation, but fascist intellectual property policy. For this, one might read "Intellectual property rights in Fascist Italy: 'Modernization' and continuity under dictatorship" a 2024 article by Giacomo Gabbuti, Caterina Sganga, Alessandro Nuvolari, in which the authors state:

Mussolini’s Fascism promoted a new kind of autocratic regime, whose ideology aimed to combine “traditional”, openly reactionary, and conservative policies and rhetoric. These included the realm of family and gender roles, in opposition to urbanism, and more broadly, in a celebration of the “irrational” in politics, a truly “modernistic” tendency towards future and change–and possibly its own peculiar “myth of science”.  This is exemplified by the rationalist architecture characterising most public buildings.

One can see existing examples of such architecture not only in Italy and Germany but also in Washington DC (all those neo-Le Corbusier monstrosities). The world does not need more. 


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