You're both right and wrong - the US was not a member of the Berne Convention (1886) until 1988 but copyright -is- inbuilt into the US Constitution.
See http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html
I'm uncertain as to when the US and the UK consumated "copyright relations" but you will find various well documented cases where authors such as Dickens (in the mid-19th century) could not recoup their royalties from the US markets. This could well be the aforementioned "unauthorised printing"
f.
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You're both right and wrong - the US was not a member of the Berne Convention (1886) until 1988 but copyright -is- inbuilt into the US Constitution. See http://arl.cni.org/info/frn/copy/timeline.html I'm uncertain as to when the US and the UK consumated "copyright relations" but you will find various well documented cases where authors such as Dickens (in the mid-19th century) could not recoup their royalties from the US markets. This could well be the aforementioned "unauthorised printing" f.