"All rights reserved" is a phrase that originated in copyright law as a formal requirement for copyright notice. It indicates that the copyright holder reserves, or holds for their own use, all the rights provided by copyright law under one specific copyright treaty.

Origins

The phrase appears to have originated as a result of the Buenos Aires Convention of 1910. Article 3 of the Convention granted copyright in all signatory countries to a work registered in any signatory country, as long as a statement "that indicates the reservation of the property right" (emphasis added) appeared in the work. The phrase "all rights reserved" was not specified in the text, but met this requirement.

Other international copyright treaties did not require this formality. For example, the Universal Copyright Convention (UCC), adopted in 1952, adopted the © symbol as an indicator of protection. (The symbol had been introduced in the US by a 1954 amendment to the Copyright Act of 1909.) The Berne Convention rejected formalities altogether in Article 4 of the 1908 revision, so authors seeking to protect their works in countries that had signed on to the Berne Convention were also not required to use the "all rights reserved" formulation. However, because not all Buenos Aires signatories were members of Berne or the UCC, and in particular the United States did not join UCC until 1955, a publisher in a Buenos Aires signatory seeking to protect a work in the greatest number of countries between 1910 and 1952 would have used both the phrase "all rights reserved" and the copyright symbol.