Literary Copyright | Page 7

a purchaser from an author is
made dependent on his nationality? Why should the property of the
manufacturer of cloths, carpets, satins, and any and every description of
goods, be able to send his products all over the world, subject only to
the tariff laws of the various countries, while the author (alone of all
known producers) is forbidden to do so? The existing law of our
country says to the foreign author, "You can have property in your
book only if you manufacture it into salable form in this country."
What would be said of the wisdom or wild folly of a law which sought
to protect other American industries by forbidding the importation of
all foreign manufactures?
No question of tariff protection is here involved. What duty shall be
imposed upon foreign products or foreign manufactures is a question of
political economy. The wrong against which authors should protest is
in annexing to their terms of ownership of their property a protective
tariff revision. For, be it observed, this is a subject of abstract justice,
moral right, and it matters nothing whether the author be American,
English, German, French, Hindoo, or Chinese,--and it is very certain
that when America shall enact a simple, just, copyright law, giving to

every human being the same protection of law to his property in his
mental products as in the work of his hands, every civilized nation on
earth will follow the noble example.
As it now stands, authors who annually produce the raw material for
manufacturing purposes to an amount in value of millions, supporting
vast populations of people, authors whose mental produce rivals and
exceeds in commercial value many of the great staple products of our
fields, are the only producers who have no distinct property in their
products, who are not protected in holding on to the feeble tenure the
law gives them, and whose quasi-property in their works, flimsy as it is,
is limited to a few years, and cannot with certainty be handed down to
their children. It will be said, it is said, that it is impossible for the
author to obtain an acknowledgment of absolute right of property in his
brain work. In our civilization we have not yet arrived at this state of
justice. It may be so. Indeed some authors have declared that this
justice would be against public policy. I trust they are sustained by the
lofty thought that in this view they are rising above the petty realm of
literature into the broad field of statesmanship.
But I think there will be a general agreement that in the needed revisal
of our local copyright law we can attain some measure of justice. Some
of the most obvious hardships can be removed. There is no reason why
an author should pay for the privilege of a long life by the loss of his
copyrights, and that his old age should be embittered by poverty
because he cannot have the results of the labor of his vigorous years.
There is no reason why if he dies young he should leave those
dependent on him without support, for the public has really no more
right to appropriate his book than it would have to take his house from
his widow and children. His income at best is small after he has divided
with the publishers.
No, there can certainly be no valid argument against extending the
copyright of the author to his own lifetime, with the addition of forty or
fifty years for the benefit of his heirs. I will not leave this portion of the
topic without saying that a perfectly harmonious relation between
authors and publishers is most earnestly to be desired, nor without the
frank acknowledgment that, in literary tradition and in the present
experience, many of the most noble friendships and the most generous
and helpful relations have subsisted, as they ought always to subsist,

between the producers and the distributors of literature, especially
when the publisher has a love for literature, and the author is a
reasonable being and takes pains to inform himself about the publishing
business.
One aspect of the publishing business which has become increasingly
prominent during the last fifteen years cannot be overlooked, for it is
certain to affect seriously the production of literature as to quality, and
its distribution. Capital has discovered that literature is a product out of
which money can be made, in the same way that it can be made in
cotton, wheat, or iron. Never before in history has so much money been
invested in publishing, with the single purpose of creating and
supplying the market with manufactured goods. Never before has there
been such an appeal to the reading public, or such a study of its tastes,
or supposed tastes, wants,