Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (Modernist Literature and Culture)
Language: English
Pages: 384
ISBN: 0199927871
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
The names of James Joyce and Ezra Pound ring out in the annals of literary modernism, but few recognize the name of Samuel Roth. A brash, business-savvy entrepreneur, Roth made a name--and a profit--for himself as the founding editor and owner of magazines that published selections from foreign writings--especially the risqué parts--without permission. When he reprinted segments of James Joyce's epochal novel Ulysses, the author took him to court.
Without Copyrights tells the story of how the clashes between authors, publishers, and literary "pirates" influenced both American copyright law and literature itself. From its inception in 1790, American copyright law offered no or less-than-perfect protection for works published abroad--to the fury of Charles Dickens, among others, who sometimes received no money from vast sales in the United States. American publishers avoided ruinous competition with each other through "courtesy of the trade," a code of etiquette that gave informal, exclusive rights to the first house to announce plans to issue an uncopyrighted foreign work. The climate of trade courtesy, lawful piracy, and the burdensome rules of American copyright law profoundly affected transatlantic writers in the twentieth century. Drawing on previously unknown legal archives, Robert Spoo recounts efforts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Bennett Cerf--the founder of Random House--and others to crush piracy, reform U.S. copyright law, and define the public domain.
Featuring a colorful cast of characters made up of frustrated authors, anxious publishers, and willful pirates, Spoo provides an engaging history of the American public domain, a commons shaped by custom as much as by law, and of piracy's complex role in the culture of creativity.
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captioned “An act for the encouragement of learning, by securing the copies of maps, charts, and books, to the authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein mentioned.”70 The statute’s grant of federal copyrights aimed to stimulate American authorship, while its creation of a copyright vacuum for foreign authors no less clearly benefited American publishers, printers, and book manufacturers, together with readers who could purchase foreign works at a fraction of the original
printed abroad and brought over in sheets to be bound here with the importer’s imprint, they become legally free here to anyone who cares to ‘pirate’ them.”9 Many other 70 • WITHOUT COPYRIGHTS nations protected an author’s copyright from the moment he or she created the work and extended to foreign authors the same protections enjoyed by citizens. This principle of national treatment was required of all signatories to the Berne Convention, an international agreement that the United States, as
material, felt they benefited from the clause.16 As late as 1954, the printers’ unions and book manufacturers strongly opposed modification of the clause by legislation or international agreement.17 Pound T R A N S AT L A N T I C M O D E R N I S M I N T H E A M E R I C A N P U B L I C D O M A I N • 7 1 assailed the law’s unvarnished protectionism as “iniquitous and stupid in principle.”18 In numerous articles and letters, he linked the tariff and the manufacturing clause as evils besetting
the twentieth century and came to serve as a quiet but crucial extralegal remedy for transatlantic modernists disadvantaged by American copyright law. The disgust shown in the early twentieth century for lawful piracy was in part a continuation of the nineteenth-century evangelism against the exploitation of unprotected foreign authors. But additional factors now fueled this feeling. The 1891 and 1909 U.S. copyright acts, in making copyright protection conditionally available to foreign authors,
These novelists “have made tools and established conventions which do their business,” Woolf wrote. “But those tools are not our tools, and that business is not our business. For us those conventions are ruin, those tools are death.”138 The sense of a gulf between the present generation and previous ones, between staid incompetence and candid experimentation, between us and them, pervades the writings of modernist authors. For Pound, however, rivalry with the past was more than aesthetic
