CONCERNING COPYRIGHT. AN OPEN LETTER TO THE REGISTER OF BY MARK TWAIN. Thorwald Stolberg, Esq., Dear Sir: I have received your excellent summary of the innumerable statutes and substitutes and amendments which a century of Congresses has devised in trying to mete out even-handed justice to the public and the author in the vexed matter of copyright; and, in response to your invitation to the craftsmen of my guild to furnish suggestions for further legislation upon the subject, I beg to submit my share in the unconventional form of Question and Answer. Question. How many new American books are copyrighted annually in the United States? Answer. Five or six thousand. Q. How many have been copyrighted in the last twenty-five years? Copyright, 1904, by THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW PUBLISHING COMPANY. All Rights Reserved, Q. How many altogether in the past 104 years? A. Doubtless 250,000. Q. How many of them have survived or will survive the 42year limit? A. An average of five per year. Make it ten, to be safe and certain. Q. Do you actually believe that 249,000 of these books have had no sort of use for a 42-year limit? A. I can swear to it. They would not have outlived a 20-year limit. Q. Then where is the use of a 42-year limit? A. I know of none. Q. What does it accomplish? A. Nothing useful, nothing worthy, nothing modest, nothing dignified, nothing honest, so far as I know. An Italian statesman has called it "the Countess Massiglia of legal burlesque." Each year ten venerable copyrights fall in, and the bread of ten persons is taken from them by the Government. This microscopic petty larceny is all that is accomplished. Q. It does seem a small business. A. For a big nation-yes. A distinct reversal of the law of the survival of the fittest. It is the assassination of the fittest. Q. Of course, the lawmakers knew they were arranging a hardship for some persons--all laws do that. But they could not have known how few the number was, do you think? A. Of course not. Otherwise, they would not have been worrying and suffering over copyright laws for a hundred years. It has cost you, sir, 41 pages of printed notes to merely outline the acres of amendments and substitutes they have ground out in a century—to take the bread out of the mouths of ten authors per year; usually the ten poorest and most distinguished literary servants of the nation! One book from each of them. It takes a hundred years to hook a thousand books, and by that time eight hundred of them have long ago fallen obsolete and died of inanition. Q. Certainly there is something most grotesque about this! Is this principle followed elsewhere in our laws? A. Yes, in the case of the inventors. But in that case it is worth the Government's while. There are a hundred thousand new inventions a year, and a thousand of them are worth seizing at the end of the 17-year limit. But the Government can't seize the really great and immensely valuable ones-like the telegraph, the telephone, the air-brake, the Pullman car, and some others, the Shakespeares of the inventor-tribe, so to speak-for the prodigious capital required to carry them on is their protection from competition; their proprietors are not disturbed when the patents perish. Tell me, who are of first importance in the modern nation? Q. Shall we say the builders of its civilization and promoters of its glory? A. Yes. Who are they? Q. Its inventors; the creators of its literature; and the country's defenders on land and sea. Is that correct? A. I think so. Well, when a soldier retires from the wars, the Government spends $150,000,000 a year upon him and his, and the pension is continued to his widow and orphans. But when it retires a distinguished author's book at the end of 42 years, it takes the book's subsequent profits away from the widow and orphans and gives them-to whom? Q. To the public. A. Nothing of the kind! Q. But it does-the lawmaker will tell you so himself. A. Who deceived the lawmaker with that limpid falsehood? Q. Falsehood? A. That is what it is. And the proof of it lies in this large, and eloquent, and sarcastic fact: that the Government does not give the book to the public, it gives it to the publishers. Q. How do you make that out? A. It is very simple: the publisher goes on publishing—there is no law against it-and he takes all the profit, both the author's and his own. Q. Why, it looks like a crime! A. It doesn't merely look like it, it is a crime. A crime perpetrated by a great country, a proud World Power, upon ten poor devils a year. One book apiece. The profits on "Uncle Tom's Cabin" continue to-day; nobody but the publishers get themMrs. Stowe's share ceased seven years before she died; her daughters receive nothing from the book. Years ago they found them |