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Dickens’ copyfight with U.S. publishers
March 20, 2009 | 6:19 am
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By Court Merrigan
The literature copyfight has been going on a long time. My hero Charles Dickens was intimately involved, a point TeleRead has made in the past. Now here are some copyright-related highlights from Dickens vs. America, an essay by Matthew Pearl, author of the novel The Last Dickens. The essay appeared in More Intelligent Life:
In the 19th century publishing battles raged between Britain and the United States. A loophole in American copyright law enabled publishers to reprint British books at will. Until 1891, the intellectual property of non-citizens was up for grabs. Charles Dickens, Alfred Tennyson and other popular British writers lost untold amounts of income as American publishers profited. American writers, too, were commercial losers at home, as a book of poetry by Longfellow or Poe selling for one dollar had to compete with a 25 cent novel by Dickens or Thackeray.
It was an intellectual-property war every bit as fierce as today’s DVD black market in China. American publishers would send their agents to roam the wharves in New York, Philadelphia and Boston to intercept popular manuscripts coming in by ship. Across the Atlantic, English customs officials would search passenger ships coming from the States and confiscate pirated British books as contraband.
Dickens found himself in an awkward spot, torn between his financial interests and his fame. Though he did not earn royalties from his American sales, the inexpensive prices helped circulate his books and serials more widely, increasing his popularity.
When Dickens travelled to America for the first time in 1841, he crowed in a subsequent letter that “there never was a king or Emperor upon the Earth, so cheered, and followed by crowds.” He relished this adulation, which exceeded what he enjoyed back home. He also felt a natural kinship with America’s ideals of equality, democracy and liberalism. His own rags-to-riches story was embraced by the country’s public and press.
Still, he used his first visit to deliver speeches calling for an international copyright. Dickens expected right-thinking Americans to join him in the fight. But the country was going through an economic crunch, making even high-minded demands for more money unappealing. His tub-thumping especially irked American newspapers, which relied on free British content to fill their pages….
Dickens understood that there would be no international copyright in his lifetime. In 1867 he announced that Fields, Osgood & Co, a Boston publisher sponsoring his tour, would be his authorised American publisher for his forthcoming novel, “The Mystery of Edwin Drood”. Though this could not prevent pirated editions, he made a moral plea to readers to purchase the official version.
Dubbed the Dickens Controversy, this unprecedented arrangement sparked fierce debate among American publishers, who were caught off-guard by an author’s ability to sway public opinion. Some of the most notorious pirating firms felt forced to re-evaluate their positions on copyright.
I don’t think we can draw an exact analogy to today’s situation and the Internet, but I think this much is clear: as long as there as profit to be made by pirating, there will be profiteering. Building more walls won’t solve the problem. Pirates will simply scale them, laughing. And unless you’ve written, say, Bleak House, Oliver Twist, and A Christmas Carol (to say nothing of Little Dorrit), you probably won’t command the adulation of an Emperor on your book tour.
So should today’s writers forget about quitting their day jobs? Is the future Smashwords and like services? Maybe letting readers set the price? Utilize Creative Commons? Or keep plugging away in “traditional” publishing, hoping for that break-through book deal? What do TeleReaders think?
(This is assuming that you’ve written a Very Good Book to begin with.)
Moderator’s note: The photo by George Herbert Watkins is via Wikipedia.
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Comments:
Yuck! This marketspeak is disgusting. I am going to read this article, but I first need to point out how blatantly incorrect the first quoted paragraph is.
The fact that foreign copyrights were not recognised by US law was not a “loophole”. US copyright law was designed that way to protect authors in the US but give publishers in the US the ability to profit from foreign works. Translations of works were considered original works as well. This was all by design. It was done to give the US economy an advantage over other economies and stimulate rapid intellectual growth. It probably worked, too, because that was the period where the US became the dominant economy in the world.
Second, the author uses the term “intellectual property”. This means that the article is a spin doctored manipulative pack of lies wrapped around a few historical facts all pointing the reader to the planned and inevitable conclusion that “ideas are property”. So, the bias of the article being exposed, I hope Telereaders, at least, will not be sucked in to the slight of hand and start believing that Dickens (who we must all love) was somehow right in this episode.
Hello LuYu,
I’ll take your word for it that this was deliberate American govt. policy in the 19th century. So I guess that would make, say, China’s current turning of a blind eye – to say nothing of lesser players like Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam – to rampant pirating of DVDs and music a bit more rational? Especially considering the vast sums of money being made. And you could argue that very few consumers in the above-mentioned countries could afford full-priced DVDs in any case, so the purchase of pirated DVDs doesn’t really represent a loss. Just a thought.
Could you explain the following in more depth – “his means that the article is a spin doctored manipulative pack of lies wrapped around a few historical facts all pointing the reader to the planned and inevitable conclusion that “ideas are property”. I think I disagree with you somewhat here, but I want to make sure I understand what you’re saying.
And, yes, we must all love Dickens. At least I think so.
The current situation with some countries is entirely unrelated to the fact that US copyright policy did not recognize foreign copyrights until 1891 (even the article itself states this). From the article:
He should have said “copyright” instead of “intellectual property”, though. What I was arguing against was the implication that it should somehow be incorrect that US law did not recognize foreign copyright. The Statute of Anne, the world’s first copyright, did not recognize foreign copyrights either (perhaps that is because no other country had them at the time). The idea of international copyrights was cooked up by the French after they attempted — very obviously unsuccessfully — to imitate the Revolution in the English colonies in the Americas.
The lack of enforcement in China is just a result of Chinese people having invented paper and printing and being quite used to both without the trouble of copyright for more than 1000 years.
The Europeans, never doubting that their culture is superior to all others — even when all the evidence supports the contrary, made sure the Berne Convention was forced upon every other legal system in the world. I suppose they wanted to make sure copyright was “international” at all costs.
I have always loved Dickens, but if what this article says is true, my faith in his goodness will be heavily damaged. My next post will be a break down of many of the incorrect points in the article.
Okay, I suppose I have been sucked in again. “They just keep pulling me back in!” I have been reading this article, and I cannot but respond. I am really tired of these fork-tongued hacks at publications like The Economist who are trying to restructure our entire belief system for their personal profit.
This article starts off by dismissing Dickens’ failing health and the fact that his symptoms clearly indicated an impending stroke (at least according to Chinese medicine). Dickens was irate for decades over the living conditions and human cruelty in England, and everyone knows that stress and anger are extremely unhealthy (which is precisely why I should never read articles like this). For evidence of this, just read a few of his books. To imply that copyright was ultimately responsible for Dickens’ death is absurd. But this is exactly what the article implies. In order to avoid Dickens’ fate, I shall now take a few deep breaths . . .
From the article:
As I stated in my last comment, this is a misrepresentation. It was hardly a “loophole”. It was more like a deliberately designed feature. Further, I have never seen a passage in the Constitution that says which authors should be protected or that copyright should apply to all people in the world.
That is “non-US-citizens”, and “intellectual property” was hardly up for grabs as “intellectual property” did not exist — although the term had already been coined. This is also not true because copyrights would have been granted to any non-US-citizen who applied for a copyright in the US. The US just did not enforce other countries’ copyrights. So, if you wrote a book and copyrighted it in England, it would not be copyrighted in the US unless you submitted a separate application. There is nothing wrong with this.
Along those lines is the implication — repeated throughout the article — that these authors, who had already been compensated in their own countries quite handsomely, somehow were victims and left without money they rightfully deserved. One might just as well claim that these authors were being ripped off by China because the majority of the population did not speak English and therefore would not buy Dickens’ books or that authors deserved money from readers yet unborn. Have people become so ignorant that they believe rubbish such as this?
The article speaks as if these authors were destitute as a result of the hardship and suffering caused by having their profits limited to their homelands where their principal audiences were and from whence they derived the majority of their profits. If that were not ludicrous enough, the article further states that 20% of the Dickens estate was earned during his book reading tour in the US. So, a fifth of everything Dickens saved during his lifetime as a very successful author was earned without the help of copyright. The lack of copyright most likely helped greatly to contribute to this sum. On top of this, he still wanted to ask the public in the US for a monopoly? That is greed in anyone’s book. Perhaps Dickens was more like Fagin than I formerly suspected. Unfortunately, I am now going to have to look into this, and I hardly have the time to spare. I hope this all turns out to be false because Dickens is — or was — my favourite author.
This part is my favourite. Now the authors in the US were victims because they were unable to practice monopoly based pricing in the face of well written, Public Domain works. This is absurd for a few reasons. First, charging monopoly rents is both immoral and anti-Free market. The implication that the authors somehow deserved to be able to abuse the system as is currently done is just vile. I may have to leave off eating for the rest of the day. Second, back then and because formalities (the necessity to apply for and obtain copyrights — like current patents) existed, most books were in the Public Domain, and there were plenty of authors that did not apply for copyright even for commercial works. Third, works made it into the Public Domain after only 14 or 28 years (depending upon whether the author found it commercially viable to extend the term or not) providing a wealth of copyright free material for the public to use and small publishers to profit from. Finally, this statement contains the horrid assumption that the authors somehow deserved to charge something above the market price for books and were harmed by the fact that competition existed. I suppose the author might just as well argue that Twain was starving as a result of Dickens’ copyrights not be granted in the US.
The worst part of this is the quoted sections are only a single paragraph out of an entire article. If I continued to point out the falsehoods in this article, the resulting text would be larger than the latest edition of The Economist from which it comes. With garbage like this in circulation, is it any wonder that people actually believe that artists will starve without copyright?
This whole article really is a pile of festering propaganda designed to make more money for The Economist‘s publishers and their other wicked cohorts in the publishing industry. If this is news, I will certainly not shed a tear when the newspaper — and hopefully commercial news in general — follows the dodo into extinction. I am really sick and tired of being lied to so frequently.
Before I leave off, I have to answer just one more paragraph:
So, “right-thinking Americans” are those who believe in international copyright? Since when is this point of view any more valid than any other? The implication of a foregone conclusion just supports the author’s agenda.
Is this not a little bit of the pot calling the kettle black? Here is a publication claiming the opposite side of the argument in an equally biased manner. Dickens already had enough money. If he wanted a copyright in the US market, he should have applied for one. Considering that he managed, in one short trip, to make a fifth of his lifetime savings, it is hard to concede that he should have been asking for more. In fact, asking for more is clearly greedy.
The assumption that Dickens was right and that US copyright law was wrong is hardly a foregone conclusion. It is also telling that a subject of a monarchy should consider himself in a position to request that Western culture’s first Free Society increase its use of government backed monopolies.
I always believed that Dickens was fighting for the Common Man against cruelty and oppression. That he would request the US to increase its intellectual oppression for his personal profit just makes him appear to be the same as the villains in his books. If this all really happened, I say, shame on him. And shame on The Economist for publishing such filth.
It really is true about Dickens. I am very disappointed.
According to the Patry Copyright Blog:
If you do not know, William Patry is Google’s “Senior Copyright Counsel”, and his blog was somewhat famous among the copyright crown on the net.
I spoke incorrectly about the term of copyright when Dickens visited the US. By then the initial term had been expanded to 28 years with a possible 14 year extension (as opposed to the earlier 14 year initial term). In any case, it was no where near the current authors life plus 70 years.
Oh, this horrible article. Will the collateral damage never cease? It turns out that Mark Twain campaigned for stronger copyright as well. All these authors and their descendants were made rich by copyright, but they still had to ask for more. The only casualty of this was Free Speech. It is unfortunate that we had to wait for the invention and popularisation of the internet for this to be made clear.
@LuYu – It wouldn’t have been so easy as applying for American copyright. If I understand correctly, the author had to live in the US to enjoy US copyright. Otherwise, I’m sure Dickens would have been more than happy to file a peice of paper in lieu of all else he did.
Good points otherwise. Don’t let it get you too much in a huff, though; there will always be more things to fight.