and partly with the people, whilst the duty of seeing the law applied rests upon the courts alone.

Generally speaking, throughout the land criminal and civil justice is fairly, adequately and decently administered, so as to reflect high credit upon the American judge. Nevertheless, there are instances where judicial buffoonery, inefficiency, or incapacity, widely advertised, have tended to bring the whole institution into disrepute. While perhaps neither possible nor desirable to standardize methods or manners, it is possible as well as essential to sustained confidence in the courts, that the administration of justice should at least always be simple, dignified, certain, and uniform. Justice cannot be dramatized any more than it can be commercialized, without loss and injury to the state, and all judges everywhere are interested in seeing that the reputation of the American Bench does not suffer from the fears or the vanity of a few charlatans, and when its processes are perverted for the amusement or entertainment of the public, or to gratify personal vanity, it is cheapened and its influence weakened.

The Section has, therefore, endeavored to bring the judges of the country into more intimate contact and to that end to induce every judge of a court of record to become a member of this Association, which has done more and can do more to preserve the purity of the law, and the dignity of its agencies than any other influence.

Of more than 4000 judges actively engaged in the administration of justice in this country, only 1005 were in 1927 members of this Association.

And yet when we consider the vast area of this country, its enormous population, the facility of communication between its several parts, the incredible volume of its statutory law, the vital interest which each section has, in conditions in every other section, the intricate and complex character of its institutions and domestic problems, the diversity of most of its law and procedure, and the difficulties in the way of a uniform, adequate administration of justice throughout its extent caused by these conditions, it would seem that every judge interested in the advancement of justice, should, as a matter of duty, support the only agency

through which the efforts of the profession to that end can possibly find adequate expression.

To sustain interest among its members, and to aid it in its work, the Section has in the last year, for the first time, created committees to cooperate with other sections and committees of the Association engaged in work closely related to the every day routine work of the courts. These committees are:

Jurisprudence and Law Reform: Chairman, Edward R. Finch, Supreme Court, Appellate Division, New York; D. Linley Sloan, Court of Appeals of Maryland; Emmett N. Parker, Olympia, Wash.

Criminal Law and Criminology: Chairman, John T. Adams, Denver, Colo.; Fred H. Blume, Cheyenne, Wyo.; H. A. Calvert, Denver, Colo. Uniform Judicial Procedure: Chairman, William W. Westerfield, New Orleans, La.; Oliver P. Coshow, Salem, Ore.; Wm. M. McCrea, Salt Lake City, Utah.

The Section held its annual meeting in the Olympic Hotel on July 24, 1928, at which meeting it carried out its announced program and elected its officers for the ensuing year.

It was suggested that in compiling the membership list of the Association that the judges be grouped separately or have some distinguising mark, such as the initial "J" following their names in the membership list. It is thought that this may be of some service to the Membership Committee, to members of the Bar and to the judges of the several courts throughout the country.

At times judges of the several courts, members of judicial commissions or other organizations connected with the improvement in methods of judicial administrators have occasion to ascertain and compare methods and plans adopted in other jurisdictions, and it would be convenient and useful to them to be able to ascertain readily the personnel of the several courts throughout the country.

(See Proceedings, infra, p. 582.)

Chairman Long:

The next will be the report of the Section of Patent, Trademark and Copyright Law which will be made by Mr. Edward S. Rogers, of Chicago, Illinois.

Mr. Rogers:

The members will find the printed report of this Section in the pamphlet containing the program and committee reports.

Chairman Long:

This Section reports some bills for approval, and in the approval of bills it is necessary that they be approved by a vote of two-thirds of the members present.

Mr. Rogers:

As the report of this Section is all in print, and the bills for which we ask the approval of the Association are appended to that report it is not necessary for me to take any more time to outline them. At the Buffalo meeting we had five items on our legislative program which we considered of prime importance, one being H. R. No. 6687, which is a bill to transfer the jurisdiction heretofore given to the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia to the Court of Customs Appeals. The reason is that the Court of Appeals of the District of Columbia consists of three Judges who are greatly overworked. They are a year and a half to two years behind in their work. The Court of Customs Appeals consists of five Judges and by some curious situation they have very little to do. It is thought that Patent Appeals can be greatly expedited by transferring the jurisdiction from one court to the other. A bill accomplishing this was prepared in the Section and introduced in the Congress last fall. It passed the House, and has passed the Senate with amendments, and is now pending in Congress.

House Bill No. 5527, to prevent fraud and improper practice in connection with business before the United States Patent Office, received the approval of the Section at the last meeting. It passed the House and has been reported favorably by the Senate.

House Bill No. 12112 is a bill amending the statutes of the United States with respect to reissue of defective patents, which has been passed by the House and is now a law.

House Bill No. 13453, a bill amending the statutes of the United States to provide for copyright registration of designs, was approved by the Patent Section. It was approved at the Buffalo meeting, but after its introduction in Congress, and after certain committee hearings certain amendments were made. The bill in its amended form is printed in the program. The bill is substantially the same as one approved by the Association. We

believe it would be desirable to have the Association's approval of the bills as printed in the amended form.

Thereupon H. R. 6687, H. R. 5527 and H. R. 13453 were approved.*

Mr. Rogers:

There is another bill for which we ask the approval of the Association. This is House Bill No. 9586. It has been a handicap to the United States for many years that it has not been a member of the International Copyright Convention which was first proposed at Berne, and called the Berne Convention. Of all the important countries in the world only the United States, China and Russia are outside. The purpose of the convention is to secure automatically throughout the world the protection of intellectual productions, the works of an author in every member country. There are twenty-eight countries members of the Union, and we have not been able to join because of certain obstructions in the Copyright Law of the United States. It is proposed by this bill to remove those obstructions which prevent our entry. We ask the action of the Association approving the bill, which is found on page 73 of the Advance Program and Committee Reports. It has been very fully discussed by the Patent Section, and has its approval.

Otto Raymond Barnett, of Illinois:

I would like to speak in opposition to this bill. It is not without some reluctance that I oppose a measure which in a way has been fathered by my good friend Mr. Rogers. I am not coming as a mere obstructionist. The bill comes before this Association with the endorsement of the Section on Patent, Trade Mark and Copyright Law by one vote. We in that section are by no means a unit as to the desirability of this legislation. This is not a mere amendment of the law, but it involves a complete reversal of the copyright policy ever since we have had it.

As every lawyer knows, under the common law that which was published became the property of the public. The copyright law

*Copies of H. R. 6687, H. R. 5527 and H. R. 13453, can be secured upon application to American Bar Association, 209 S. La Salle St., Chicago, Ill.

by statute saved the rights of the author if he would comply with statutory requirements, one of which has always been notice to the country, that the public shall have notice on the copyright material and be advised of the fact that a copyright has been reserved, so that nobody may infringe a copyright or subject himself to the more stringent penalties and procedures of our copyright law without first having had an opportunity to know that the matter is copyrighted.

Now that is not the European system. Most of the countries, copyright any matter; that is, anything than can be produced by the arts, and whenever matter is produced it is automatically copyrighted. You need no notice. Or put it the other way, the public cannot appropriate in whole or in part; you cannot take a page or excerpt or condensation of a musical composition, picture, photograph, or whatnot, without being on notice that it is copyrighted unless it was produced, I believe in most countries, at least fifty years before.

Now if you introduce this feature into the United States no writer, no advertising man, no business man can use anything that he finds in print without taking the chance of violating the copyright, because if that matter was produced by a citizen of one of the twenty-eight countries belonging to this copyright union, and it has been published, it is automatically copyrighted.

It is a very, very serious thing, and it involves a reversal of the policy of this country, and a reversal of the constitutional intention. It is provided by the constitution that Congress may protect exclusive rights to inventors and writers. We know that there is a mass of material being produced all the time which might be copyrighted, and which is not copyrighted, and therefore free to be used, and if we introduce this system of copyrights you absolutely leave that all out, and whether a man cares to become a publisher or not, and whether he cares to copyright or not, automatically everything is copyrighted, and the public has no way of finding out when it was copyrighted, or by whom, or how long it has run. I believe that there should be a notice as to what is copyrighted matter, because it is the policy of the American Law to give to the public everything that the writer does not claim by giving notice of his copyright. That is the theory on which the lawyers of the section voted, and by one vote adopted