Blog: Analysing Britain’s earliest copyrighted photographs

[Michael Pritchard]

Katherine Howells at The National Archives, Kew, has written a blog about the copyright records held at TNA and how the data can around them be analysed.  In the 1860s photography as a new medium was coming under scrutiny and issues of ownership and copyright were being debated. This culminated in the 1862 Fine Arts Copyright Act, which allowed people to register photographs, paintings, and drawings with the Stationers’ Company for copyright protection for the first time. These records are now held at The National Archives in record series COPY 1.

This blog explores how the rich catalogue data for this collection can be cleaned and analysed in order to reveal how photographers and publishers responded to the new legislation and uncover information about the nature of photographic industries in the early 1860s.

Read the full blog here: https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/analysing-britains-earliest-co...

Thanks to Dick Weindling for flagging this up.