AMERICAN LITERARY PIRACY.
In the London Figaro, the editor thus writes: Those literary men who are agitating for a copyright convention with the United States have doubtless suffered in the following way, which seems to me particularly hard on some of the authors of this country. I am, let it be assumed, then, the writer of a number of short stories, which, at anyrate, for the purposes of my statement, I will conclude to have been good enough to earn sufficient popularity to bring them within the purview of the American book pirates. Very well—my stories are taken as quickly as they appear and published in the States, not only in a book-form, but in all the principal newspapers which devote some of their columns to fiction.
For this honour I, of course, receive never a cent, and that is a distinct hardship, I take it. But that is not all. My stories having appeared in the States, slightly altered to suit American tastes, and without my name attached, are read and admired by the editors of English provincial journals, who straightway proceed to cut out the fictions in question, and alter them back again, to suit the idiosyncrasies of their British readers. Thus my handiwork appears a second time in this country; and in not one, but possibly a dozen or a score of provincial newspapers.
The result is this. When I go, a month or two after, and offer a collection of my short stories to a London publisher, he reads them, and replies in effect: ‘Yes, I like your stories very well; but what is the use of my publishing them, when they have appeared in half the country papers in the kingdom?’ It is in vain I explain. The injury has been done; and an apology from the country editors is but a slight and unsatisfactory atonement for an act which has kept me out of scores or hundreds of pounds.
Besides this, there are other publishers who, seeing that my fiction appears in the Little Pedlington Mirror or the Mudborough Gazette, mentally determine that my calibre as a writer cannot be very great if I am reduced to dispose of my copy to such papers as these. And therefore, through no fault of my own, but, as a matter of fact, in actual consequence of my success, my reputation as a writer is positively injured in quarters in which it is most important to me it should be sustained. I have been describing incidents which have really occurred, I may add; and I think that the grievance is one that needs serious attention, with a view to its redress.
[The editor of Figaro has our fullest sympathy. We, too, are the victims of American malpractices. Many of the short stories which appear in Chambers’s Journal are copied into the American newspapers without leave, and without acknowledgment of the source whence taken. These papers reach Great Britain with the purloined material, which our provincial press in turn transfers to its pages. Expostulation is of no avail: the British journalist sees a story in an American newspaper which will suit his purpose, and at once takes possession of property, which of course he believes to be American (and therefore legitimate spoil), but which has in reality been paid for and previously published by ourselves. We thus doubtless lose many subscribers, who, finding our Tales and Stories given at full length in the penny papers, are pleased to have them at a slightly cheaper rate than the original.—Ed. Ch. Jl.]