Remember that 1897 NYTimes story on music industry complaints that revenues had fallen fifty percent because “Canadian pirates” were flooding the market with “spurious editions” of copyrighted music? Well in that context it’s worth remembering that the United States has quite a pirate history of its own.
Over the weekend All Things Considered interviewed Matthew Pearl about his new novel, The Last Dickens. A mix of fact and fiction, the novel looks at Dickens’ 1867 tour of America:
We had a very strange copyright law, at least strange to our ears and eyes today, because we would not give copyright protection here in the United States to any foreign citizens. Well, what this meant is that someone like Charles Dickens could be published and printed by any newspaper, any publisher, without paying him a cent, either in advance or as royalties once copies were sold. […]
Since there was no copyright for foreign authors, the value in publishing a foreign author became who could publish it first, not who could get permission to publish it. So there was a race to intercept manuscripts and advance sheets from A-list writers by the pirating publishers in the United States because if they could publish it first, it was worth simply thousands of dollars.
So they sent these literary bounty hunters, what I call the bookaneers, to the wharfs in Boston, Philadelphia and New York and wait for shipments of new books to come in from Great Britain and a few other countries by messengers that were aboard ships to be delivered to certain publishers.
An NPR commenter objects to the “Bookaneer” label, noting that what those American bounty hunters were doing was perfectly legal.
Unlike the 19th century Birts, the U.S. has forcefully exported its copyright control regime to the world through trade agreements and by threatening to withhold needed aid unless countries signed on. So today we can be righteously outraged by the behavior of pirates in China and India who operate just as our own industry once did.
The Dickens story wonderfully illustrates the similarities and differences between copyright then and now. Copyfighters have long argued that you can make money by giving away your books for free. Check out Cory Doctorow in 2005:
The important thing for me isn’t whether or not I lose some sales. The important thing for me is whether I gain more sales than I’ve lost… The thing that’s important to me isn’t to get 100% of a very small pie, it’s to make sure that the piece of pie that I get is as large as possible.
And so I think that by giving books away I make a much larger pie. I gave away half a million copies of my first novel through my website and God knows how many more copies have been given away through other people’s websites. It’s just gone into its fifth printing!…
You can think about this as dramatically lowering my cost of customer acquisition while simultaneously lowering my per customer revenue. So I was able to acquire 500,000 customers for free, but most of them never bought the book, so the other ones are paying for the free ride…
Charles Dickens in 1897 did not make one cent from royalties from American sales. But:
When Charles Dickens arrived in Boston Harbor, where he started, they had to keep it secret because there was such a mob of people expecting him, and they actually chased down his carriage at the hotel, the Parker House Hotel – which is still here – and as he got out of the coach, people would rip parts of his coat off, his little strands of his shawl, and this is how it was the entire time. He really was our version of a rock star. […]
Now this was a bit of a double-edged sword because on the one hand, Dickens lost untold amounts of money through this arrangement. On the other hand, he became extremely famous because there were so many editions – and quite affordable editions – of his book. So he was pretty savvy.
He was upset at first, for a while back – going back about 20 years from his first trip to America, but he figured out how to exploit this, by using the fame to earn money through, as you say, actual personal appearances. It was such a different time, but in a way he was inventing what we would know of as a book tour.
The U.S. wasn’t quick to honor foreign copyrights. In fact, the United States would not sign the Berne Convention, an international agreement governing copyright, until 1989.