(Extract from the Atlantic Monthly, October, 1867.)
... This work, we repeat, cost the author 24,000 dollars to produce. Messrs. Harpers sell it at 15 dollars a copy; the usual allowance to the author is 10 per cent. of the retail price, and as a rule, it ought not to be more.
(Extract from the American Booksellers’ Guide, June 1, 1869.)
At a public meeting recently held in Montreal, respecting the Copyright-Law, it was resolved to apply to Parliament for an amendment permitting Canadian publishers to print British Copyright works upon the payment of 12½ per cent. to British authors.... The payment by the publisher of 5 or 10 per cent., or of a fixed sum, for a Copyright of a book, whether by an American or British author, does not necessarily increase the price of the book.
(Extracts from an Article in the Athenæum, July 17, 1869.)
This great question is of especial interest at the present time, in consequence of opinions and demands put forward by Canada with relation to Copyright property in the United Kingdom. It appears that for some time past a correspondence has been carried on between the Canadian Government and the Imperial authorities upon the subject of “Copyright-Law in Canada.” This “Correspondence” (having been laid before the Canadian Parliament) has been printed and published. It commences with a resolution of the Canadian Senate (passed 15th of May, 1868) that the Governor-General should be prayed “to impress upon Her Majesty’s Government the justice and expediency of extending the privileges of the Imperial Copyright Act, 1847, so that whenever reasonable provision and protection shall, in Her Majesty’s opinion, be secured to the authors, Colonial reprints of British Copyright works shall be placed on the same footing as foreign reprints in Canada, by which means British authors will be more effectually protected in their rights, and a material benefit will be conferred on the printing industry of the Dominion.”...
All the North-American colonies soon availed themselves of this Act of 1847, and Orders in Council were founded upon them; the rights of British authors being deemed sufficiently protected by an ad valorem import duty of 20 per cent. upon the value of the “foreign reprints,” that, being about one-tenth of the price of the works as published in England!
There appears to have been no debate in either House upon this Act of 1847, and it seems to have escaped all public notice on the part of British authors and publishers during its progress in Parliament. From the time Her Majesty’s Orders in Council enabled the colonies to avail themselves of that Act, it has operated as a stimulus and considerable premium to the “legalised robbery” of British Copyright property in the United States, and has, practically, given printers and publishers there a monopoly in “foreign reprints” of English books. The Act of 1847 is, therefore, a partial confiscation of those Copyrights which have been acquired in England under Earl Stanhope’s Act of 1842, because the colonies have, for the last twenty years, been almost exclusively supplied with English books by United States reprints of those books....
In 1867 the “dominion of Canada” was created by the Imperial Act of that year, which united all Her Majesty’s North American Colonies. It was then found that printing had become much cheaper in Canada than it was in the United States; and amongst the earliest Acts of the first session of the Canadian Parliament two statutes were passed—one, “An Act respecting Copyrights;” and the other, “An Act to impose a Duty upon Foreign Reprints of British Copyright Works.” Under the first of these Acts, no work of “any person resident in Great Britain or Ireland” is to be entitled to the protection of that Act unless “the same shall be printed and published in Canada.” And under the second of the above Acts it is sought to keep alive the injustice of allowing “foreign reprints” to be imported into Canada as a basis for that resolution of the Canadian Parliament to which we have called attention.