On July 3, 1891, the first foreign work, a play called Saints and Sinners by British author Henry Arthur Jones, was registered under the act.

Their biggest problem were American printers that already were protected by a high tariff on imported works, and who had no wish to pay royalties to English writers or publishers.

Authors including Mark Twain, Louisa May Alcott, Edward Eggleston, and Bill Nye wrote letters in the mid-1880s to the Century requesting international copyright.

In 1885, United States Senator Joseph Roswell Hawley introduced a bill aimed at extending copyright to foreign authors for consideration by Congress.

[5] It was ultimately unsuccessful, though Mark Twain involved himself in the lobbying process and influenced President Grover Cleveland's thinking on the matter.

American representatives had attended the Berne conference only as observers and it would take another 5 years until the United States took its first step to protect foreign works.

The International Copyright Act of 1891 now applied these formalities to foreign publishers as well, but added an extra requirement called the "Manufacturing Clause".

The Manufacturing Clause required that all copies of foreign literary works should be printed from type set in the United States if they were to have American protection.

This too would create a problem, but by the early 1900s British authors were granted American Copyright since it was published abroad thirty days from its deposit in Washington, D.C.

One of the most extensive changes was that from the date the Act went into effect, all books were required to be manufactured in the United States in order to obtain American copyright.