A COPYRIGHT RESTORED: MARK TWAIN, MARY ANN CORD, AND HOW TO RIGHT A LONGSTANDING WRONG

Did Mark Twain and the Atlantic infringe a copyright belonging to Mary Ann Cord in the telling of how enslavers tore her family apart and how her son returned years later, as a Union soldier, to liberate her from bondage? If so, could that long-ignored infringement be remedied today?This Article answers these questions and, in so doing, provides wide-ranging insights into how the doctrines of consent, estoppel, laches, abandonment, adverse possession, escheat, and the statute of limitations apply in copyright law. Cord's case-nearly a century-and-a-half-old but examined for the first time in this project-can also help chart a course for how to address other longstanding wrongs in intellectual property and beyond. This includes those raised in recent lawsuits against Harvard for its exploitation of enslaved people's images and Tulsa for the 1921 race massacre on Black Wall Street.The project's first part, "A Copyright Ignored," forthcoming in the Journal of the Copyright Society of the U.S.A., focuses on the issue of copyrightability and argues that Cord was an author who had a common-law copyright in the words she spoke to Twain.This second part, "A Copyright Restored," tackles the issues of infringement and remedy, arguing that (1) Twain and the Atlantic likely violated Cord's rights by publishing her expression without her consent, and (2) her descendants could perhaps still bring a claim today. Given that it continues to publish and promote "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It," I propose that the Atlantic and the Mark Twain Foundation should seek out Cord's descendants and consider-among other potential remedies-adjusting the credit to recognize Cord, not just Twain, as the work's author.In this way, a copyright ignored can be now in a sense restored, setting a vital precedent for righting longstanding wrongs when and how best we can.