Abstract
I’m a big student of the nineteenth century. I love the 1800s, I write about them, and I think about them a lot. There are a lot of questions in modern copyright law where we look back, and we spend time thinking about what was going on in the 1800s and opinions from the 1800s. And so when we came up with this idea to talk about the scope of copyright, I went back to the cases from the 1800s, and the Supreme Court has told us a lot about what is copyrightable and what is not from a perspective of merger—from a perspective of protecting laws or not.