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Updated: May 11, 2025
Learned americans, and the british writers applied in vain to congress for a lawful protection of their honest labor. A subject of such an importance as the International Copy-right, the truly, and best pride of nations, had been neglected, in order to give place to long speeches on dollars and cents, and on the presidential election.
The corn comparison against the International Copy-right, which I read in some newspapers, is a laming comparison. We have all the same right on a seed of nature. A manuscript is as good property to the writer, as an original machine to its inventor. A book is a work of new ideas, originated from man's mind, and not a seed. Corn is corn; and a manuscript is a manuscript.
This I could, and would make over to you at once in full copy-right, and finish it outright, with no other delay than that of finishing a short and temperate Treatise on the Corn Laws, and their national and moral effects; which had I even twenty pounds only to procure myself a week's ease of mind, I could have printed before the bill had passed the Lords.
Of these disturbing conditions Balzac's opinion was: "Undoubtedly Cooper's renown is not due to his countrymen nor to the English: he owes it mainly to the ardent appreciation of France." Cooper's income, from England, suffered on account of an act of Parliament change, in 18381 of the copy-right law.
There is no reason why a distinction should be made between copy-right and patent-right; but, if our legislators refuse to admit any abstract right in the matter, they might at least go so far as to conclude an international arrangement by which a publisher in either country who was willing to pay for the right of publication should be protected in its exercise.
Still, we are forced to acknowledge, that many american children, born to nobilitate this soil of their affection, are driven to unworthy occupations, because a few misguided citizens, with a misunderstood interest for themselves, wish to have no International Copy-right. And for what reason? Because they want cheap books!
'Accordingly a select number of the most respectable booksellers met on the occasion; and, on consulting together, agreed, that all the proprietors of copy-right in the various Poets should be summoned together; and when their opinions were given, to proceed immediately on the business.
The reply being, 'Sir, the article will not do. At length, one, more accommodating than the rest, condescended to receive my MS. poems, and, after a deliberate inspection, offered me for the copy-right, six guineas, which sum, poor as I was, I refused to accept." "Well," said I, "to encourage you, I will give you twenty guineas."
The booksellers, justly sensible of the great additional value of the copy-right, presented him with another hundred pounds, over and above two hundred, for which his agreement was to furnish such prefaces as he thought fit.
But, query? Has not all this, and the very title, for any thing I know, been done already by another, by a wiser? and, if so, by whom? An age and none so little in advance or in arrear of it as I of easy writing and discursive reading, of ideas unpatented, and books that have outlived copy-right.
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