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at 14 years. This Act also changed the prior law so that the work did not go into the public domain if the author died during the original term, and limited the renewal right to the author's surviving spouse and children, eliminating executors, administrators, and assignees. The intent of these changes appears to have been to prohibit the author from making a binding inter vivos transfer of both the original and renewal term, and to prohibit the author from conveying the renewal term to anyone other than his family.
The 1909 Act
In the 1909 general revision. Congress doubled the renewal term, so that both the renewal term and the original term were 28 years, for a possible total of 56 years. ("Possible" because if a timely, proper renewal was not filed in the final year of the original term, the work went into the public domain after only 28 years) . At the same time, the term was switched from the date of filing a prepublication title with the Library of Congress to the date of first publication. Congress had come very close to adopting a term of life of the author plus a fixed number of years, but at the last minute switched to the 28+28 structure, perhaps swayed by Mark Twain's testimony that he had only made money off of Innocents Abroad because he had retained the copyright in the renewal termT^ The House Patent Committee^® report accompanying the 1909 Act explains that it believed it was
"distinctly to the advantage of the author to preserve the renewal period. It not infrequently happens that the author sells his copyright outright to a publisher for a comparatively small sum. If the work proves to be a great success and lives beyond the term of twenty-eight years, your committee felt that it should be the exclusive right of the author to take the renewal term... . ^^
This passage also indicates Congress's intent that the author should not be able to assign the renewal term until that term
of Debates in Congress)
^^ If true, this is ironic since Twain had testified in favor of the life plus a fixed term bill, adding that he wished copyright could be perpetual. See Arguments Before the Committees on Patents on S. 6330 and H.R. 19853. 59th Cong., 1st Sess. 116-121 (1906).
^® At this time the Patent Committee, rather than Judiciary, had primary jurisdiction over intellectual property.
^^ H.R. REP. NO. 2222, 60th Cong., 2d Sess. 14 91909).