Commentary on International Copyright Act 1852

Legislation introducing the concept of translation rights within British copyright law. The document contains the following associated material: Hansard: 119 (1852): 498-502 (uk_1852a); 121 (1852): 4 (uk_1852b); Anglo-French Copyright Treaty (uk_1851).
Introduced to implement the obligations of the Anglo-French Copyright Convention, agreed in November 1851, this Act provided that the British monarch could, by Order in Council, provide foreign authors with the right to prevent the reproduction and performance of their literary and dramatic works in translation. The Act also introduces the first statutorily defined permitted acts within the UK, and is indicative of the increasing influence that international standards and obligations began to exert upon the content and substance of domestic copyright law.
The commentary locates the Act within the context of the two previous International Copyright Acts (see: uk_1838; uk_1844) and the Anglo-French Convention, highlighting the selective manner in which the British legislature implemented its obligations under the 1851 Convention, in particular in drawing a distinction between the reproduction of political and non-political material, as well as the difficulty that foreign authors experienced in complying with the provisions of the legislation.

Acts of Solidarity: Crossing and Reiterating Israeli-Palestinian Frontiers

In academic and public discourses on the Zionist-Palestinian conflict prevails still a ‘methodological nationalism’ based on a separatist imagination that overshadows the existence and role of Israeli-Palestinian forms of communality and solidarity. This article analyzes micropolitical practices that cross existing frontiers both within Israel and between occupied Palestinian territories and Israel. Through recent conceptualizations of ‘acts’, I read these ethnographic episodes in their intentional and performative dimension. What is the role of these ‘acts’? What are their effects on both the participants and the wider public? Through two interconnected cases, different functions of acts are explored. The first case relates to encounters between Israelis and Palestinian in the embattled city of Hebron in the occupied Palestinian territories; the second investigates moments of a Gandhi-inspired peace march at the ‘internal’ frontier of the Israeli Negev desert. The ethnographic perspective reveals what lies behind and beneath the acts, going beyond the obvious structures of power of the conflict. Acts function primarily as a valve of catharsis for the participants themselves, both overcoming and reproducing hegemonic discursive elements of the conflict. Paradoxically, acts of solidarity are often crucial in creating public knowledge about the conflict in more sectarian terms.