The same “old” line: since 1921 the Copyright Act has been amended by forty-one subsequent pieces of legislation, including major revisions in 1988 (twice), 1993 (three times), 1994, and 1997.
Forty-one times. On average, that’s once every two years and two months.
The original 1921 Act contained 9,434 words. The current Copyright Act, as consolidated after those forty-one sets of amendments, is more than triple the size of the original statute, at 31,223 words. (In both cases, the preamble, marginal notes, and schedules are excluded from the word counts.)
And, after all those amendments, what’s left of the 1924 legislation?
Not much, it turns out. A side-by-side comparison reveals that there are just 573 words (the red bit) in the current Act which have descended, unaltered in form and context, from the 1921.
