Towards a global copyright law: Japan’s involvement in the prewar international copyright negotiations

Abstract This article examines the mutual agency of Japanese state and non-state in shaping international copyright in the prewar period. Despite having joined the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works in 1899, Japan’s state delegates – who were advised by publishers, translators and legal scholars – used the international revision conferences of the Convention to boycott the efforts of the international copyright community to harmonize global copyright protection and further extend the protection of rights. During the 1920s, the newly established League of Nations and its expert organizations became in charge of regulating copyright protection and provided a new platform for Japanese publishers and other private actors to share their demands with the international community and thereby to directly intervene in the process of expanding global copyright protection. The analysis of the cooperation between Japanese state and non-state actors demonstrate the crucial role that Japan’s private industry actors played as agents of change not only in Japan, but in the development of global copyright norms.