Politics in Publishing: Japan and the Globalization of Intellectual Property Rights, 1890s-1970

Politics in Publishing focuses on Japan’s involvement in shaping international copyright law over a seventy-year period following the country’s 1899 accession to the Berne Convention, the first multilateral copyright treaty. During this time, Japanese state officials collaborated with various stakeholders such as publishers, translators, and legal experts to strategically influence the international revision process of the treaty. The involvement of these actors in international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations affected global copyright norms even as Japan advanced its imperial - national after 1945 - and capitalist interests.

Taking a previously lacking non-Western perspective on the history of international copyright law, Politics in Publishing highlights the complex interplay between state and private actors and between domestic and international power relations, as well as administrative transformations in the formation of the modern, global international order. Grounded in an impressive body of primary source material, this book will make a substantial contribution to interdisciplinary scholarship on intellectual property, and copyright history in particular.

Maj Hartmann is a postdoctoral researcher in political history in the Japanese Studies Research Group of the KU Leuven Faculty of Arts.