The article examines the institutionalization of copyright from the late 19th century until approximately World War I in the two multi‑ethnic empires of Southeast and East‑Central Europe (Habsburg und Romanov), before their ultimate demise and eventual replacement of the former by nation states in the first decades of the 20th century, and analyses the rationale of their respective copyright regimes during the imperial era. It does so with two objectives in mind: firstly, it advances the thesis that multi‑cultural, pluri‑lingual and multi‑lingual formations such as imperial states were faced with a different set of challenges when it came to devising their own copyright regimes (than the more or less ethnically consolidated, monolingual nation states of Western Europe that pioneered copyright legislation), and moreover that this circumstance constituted one of the principal reasons, why the empires of Eastern Europe kept away from the structures of international copyright regulation that developed in the late 19th century. Secondly, it argues that the imperial copyright legislations constituted a legal tradition that remained an important point of reference also in the later development of national copyright legislations in the region.