(Extract from the Mechanics’ Magazine, Vol. 27, 1837.)
This is the last of the new provisions mentioned in the preface, and the only one in the whole bill that seems intended for the benefit of the public. We were in hopes of finding at least one other, to provide for some method of “taxing” the price of new works, as used formerly to be done in foreign countries when a Copyright was granted. A limit is proposed to be fixed to the profits of railway companies; why are authors and publishers to be allowed to demand what sums they please? When they find they have a giant’s strength, they are too apt to use it like a giant. There is such a thing, not only in theory, but in practice, as laying too heavy a tax on an author’s admirers. In the height of Walter Scott’s popularity there was no other way of obtaining an early copy of a new poem than by purchasing it in the inconvenient form of a ponderous quarto; it generally, a few months afterwards, appeared in an octavo shape; but in one instance, Sir Walter, finding it desirable to force the sale of an unsaleable periodical with which he was connected, “The Edinburgh Annual Register,” inserted one of his poems in one of the yearly volumes, and drove all such of his adversaries as had not bought the quarto to buy a cartload of old news, along with the vision of Don Roderick. Is all this justified by the comprehensive maxim that a man may do what he likes with his own? Since the Copyright of Sir Walter’s poems has drawn near the term of extinction, his publishers have thought fit to issue them in editions not only so cheap that they suit the pocket, but so small that they may be put into it. His novels are Copyright still, and the consequence is, that they are still not only dear, but ill got up. What a torrent of Elzevir editions of “Waverley” there would be if it were now public property! At present there is not one edition of it in one volume, the most usual and convenient form for a standard novel—not one edition in Elzevir, the most usual and convenient size. And this is to remain so for the next sixty years!
Sergeant Talfourd might provide a remedy for these evils in the literary tribunal which, though he makes no proposal for it in the present Bill, he is anxious to see established, for the decision of literary cases (and his arguments for which, by the bye, would answer equally well in regard to every other profession). It would provide itself, if a project were adopted for a Copyright-Law, of which we shall now proceed to state the outlines, but without the forlornest hope of ever seeing it tried.
Let an author be empowered to sell the Copyright of his work to a particular publisher for the space of five years only—a term at the end of which nine-tenths of the works now published are completely forgotten. Let it then become public property, in the same way that a play, on being published, becomes public property, since Mr. Bulwer’s Act. As a manager now has the right to act any play he chooses, on paying a certain sum to the author for each night of representation, so let any printer have the right to print any work on paying a certain sum to the author for each copy he issues. The main, perhaps the only, objection to the plan would be the necessity of establishing some Excise regulations, with regard to printing-offices, for the prevention of fraud.
The great recommendation, of course, would be, that of every work of reputation we should have cheap and elegant editions; that such of them as required comment and illustration (and now, when the Copyrights expire, it is speedily found that very few of them do not) would receive it at an earlier period, and that the works of living authors would be much more extensively diffused than they are, while their interest would, it is hoped, be advanced in an equal proportion to their fame.
After all, however, we are afraid that no Copyright Act, however favourable to authors, will exercise a perceptible beneficial influence on literature. Our own at present is frivolous, and it is assigned as a cause that our authors are ill-protected. If this be really the cause, in what sort of a state ought that of Germany to be? It is, however, in the very country where piracy is most prevalent that solid literature is most flourishing. Unhappily, no Act of Parliament can reform the taste of the public.
(Extract from the Mechanics’ Magazine, Vol. 29, 1839.)
How and why is it that foreign editions take the place of our own? Because, undoubtedly, of the difference in the price of the two, caused by the monopoly which in one case remains in the hands of one publisher. Is it not notorious, in fact, that even those of the middle classes who have a love for literature never, with rare exceptions, purchase a Copyright book, and that for the very good reason that they cannot afford it? Their only way of getting a sight of a new publication complete is by obtaining it from a circulating library; and particular passages that they wish to have by them, for the purpose of reference or re-perusal, they get possession of, if they get possession at all, by purchasing them extracted in some of the cheap periodicals which subsist on extracts. The effect of this state of things is now manifesting itself in the condition of our literature, which is becoming more and more the literature of circulating libraries—a heavy mass of light reading. How, indeed, can it be expected that an author will take pains when he knows that all his pains will be of no use; that his history or his travels will only come into the hands of those who will be compelled to rush through them at a certain rate, and return them by a certain hour. “He who runs may read,” under the present system, and none but those who do run.
This system has come up under the twenty-eight years’ monopoly. Is it likely to be improved under a law which will secure a monopoly for sixty years certain, and perhaps a hundred? We do not think it is. The advocates of the Bill indeed triumphantly refer us to the recent cheap editions of Copyright authors, as proofs of the—we hardly know what; for what do they prove in their favour? The greater part of the works alluded to—the poems of Southey, the novels and poems of Walter Scott, are works of which the Copyright is on the verge of expiring.
The following extract is also from the same volume: