When Congress passed the 1976 Copyright Act, one of the things it tried to do was to eliminate state law protection “equivalent” to federal copyright. This was the purpose of §301(a), which expressly preempts such state claims. As the eminent Marybeth Peters wrote at the time,
Federal preemption represents the most basic change in the U.S. copyright system since its inception. Instead of the [1909 act's] dual system of protection of works under the common law before they are published and under the federal statute after publication, the new law would, under section 301, establish a single system of statutory protection …Some of the primary advantages of a single federal system are: 1. Promote national uniformity. One of the fundamental purposes behind the copyright clause in the U.S. constitution was to avoid the difficulties of determining and enforcing an author’s rights under different state laws.1
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