KNOW
YOUR RIGHTS
“Yes,
I read the illegal translation,” a Czech internet correspondent
known as “Hustey” wrote this summer, when the next,
eagerly awaited book in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter”
series—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—first
appeared in bookstores.
Hustey is one of a growing, worldwide fraternity
of internet users who seem to have come to the conclusion that
theft is morally defensible, so long as it only involves intellectual
property.
“When I saw HP I had to get it straight
away because I’ve read all the other books,” a British
university student called “Comrade Dave” wrote—as
if by way of explanation—about his own theft of Ms. Rowling’s
work. “I think it’s unfair to the German fans, just
because some people can’t read English and have to read
the German book,” opined 16-year-old Britta Sander. One
JC, a 36-year-old man from Kansas City, not only admitted his
theft but threw in a review: “I thought it was a little
slow until the second half, then it got much better”—a
bit of chutzpah akin to having someone steal your car, then post
a public notice complaining about its pick-up.
Electronic
theft has largely revolved around the downloading of popular music
through such “file-sharing” devices as Napster. Recently,
though, it has expanded to books, thanks mostly to the immense
popularity of Ms. Rowling’s series.
“This
shows that if authors and publishers choose not to make books
available legally, people are going to go out and steal them,”
claims Mike Seagroves, director of business development of something
called Palm Digital Media, the largest distributor of “e-books.”
In the old days, one usually had to be a member
of some organization like the Mafia, before one could go around
making barely veiled threats of extortion. But Palm Digital Media
apparently feels that Ms. Rowling is asking for too much money
to have her e-book distributed legally. And everyone knows that
the proper reaction to something being overpriced is to go and
steal it.
I’m being facetious, of course, but the
dispute over intellectual property rights promises to be a hotly
contested issue for years to come. It speaks to the basic divide
created by the internet—between the e-world and that of
more mundane reality; the virtual and the really real. It is all
well and good to talk about a brave, new electronic world, in
which music and now literature will be “shared” freely.
But what about all those goods and services that remain intrinsically
limited by supply? As a writer I, for one, would be happy to have
my books distributed for free—so long as I am able to pick
up beachfront properties, or nice little tins of Beluga caviar
for the same price.
Some will no doubt point out that Ms. Rowling
has already made a fortune from previous book sales. True enough.
But then Ms. Rowling was a broke, struggling single mother when
she invented Harry Potter, thereby creating a commodity that has
given joy to millions of children and adults. She has even made
it available to many readers for free—at those marvelous
institutions known as libraries. By what right, then, should she
be deprived of any of the money legally due her?
But this is not the first time that a determined
English writer, who had worked his way up from nothing to become
the most popular writer in the world, has had to fight to keep
publishing pirates from making off with his livelihood. A century-and-a-half
ago Charles Dickens faced the same battle—though back then
the main culprits were not Czech e-wizards or German teenagers,
but Americans.
The
love affair between Dickens and America started early. Citizens
of New York and Boston swarmed the docksides to get the latest
installments of The Old Curiosity Shop, reportedly crying
out to ships from England, even before they docked, “Does
Little Nell still live?” Dickens, in turn, was enchanted
with the idea of American democracy, and would claim, once he
got to the United States for the first time, in 1842, that he
had “dreamed by day and night, for years, of setting foot
upon this shore, and breathing this pure air.”
At first, everything on his initial American tour
went splendidly, and Dickens wrote with a certain awe “of
the people that line the streets when I go out; of the cheering
when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses, letters of
congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies
without end…” At a spectacular banquet in Boston,
he made a graceful speech in which he praised leading American
writers “as familiar to our [British] lips as household
words.” He went on to express the “hope the time is
not far distant when they, in America, will receive of right some
substantial profit and return in England from their labours; and
when we, in England, shall receive some substantial profit and
return in America from ours”—though Dickens assured
his audience, “Pray do not misunderstand me…I would
rather have the affectionate regard of my fellowmen than I would
have heaps and mines of gold.”
The speech was received with what those in attendance
described as wild, “tumultuous” applause. Yet the
next day’s newspapers were full of articles accusing him
of bad taste, and having “created huge dissonance where
all else was triumphant unison.” Dickens, it seemed, had
touched on an issue close to their mercenary hearts.
In
1842, there was still no international copyright law—a condition
that was stunting American letters, and depriving authors on both
sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain had the stronger domestic
copyright law, and was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign
writers—but only if their countries reciprocated by recognizing
the rights of British writers.
This American publishers adamantly refused to
do. Instead, American newspapers and magazines competed in bribing
English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. They were
then rushed over to the U.S. by boat, where the jolly pirates
worked their presses around the clock, churning out cheap, “instant”
editions in a matter of hours.
But
it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers
were willing to pay American authors for books, when
they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Even so
popular a writer as James Fenimore Cooper, had given up writing
novels altogether by 1850. Herman Melville was also hurt by the
lack of an international copyright, and even such eminent American
authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had to
routinely pay publishers an advance in order to have
their books produced.. The early giants of American literature
had to scramble for work at customs houses and in other government
jobs.
“Literature is at a sad discount,”
wrote Edgar Allen Poe in the same year as Dickens’s visit.
“Without an international copyright law, American authors
may as well cut their throats.” According to biographer
Sidney P. Moss, Poe had to raise advance money for one collection
of poems by collecting 75 cents a head from his former West Point
classmates—to whom he then dedicated the book.
Dickens would never be forced into quite such
desperate straits—but neither was he so indifferent to “heaps
and mines of gold” as he made out in Boston. He had, after
all, spent part of a childhood in a debtor’s prison, and
as the most popular writer in the world, he pointed out, “of
all men living I am the greatest loser.” The jibes of American
newspapers only got his back up, and after a speech in Hartford,
where he again pressed the issue, Dickens wrote to a friend that
“My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice
that I felt as if I were twelve feet high, when I thrust it down
their throats.”
In
fact, Dickens’s audiences, and American writers, continued
to support him enthusiastically. But the Hartford Times
bluntly informed him that, “It happens that we want no advice
on the subject and it will be better for Mr. Dickens if he refrains
from introducing the subject hereafter…” Dickens biographer
Edgar Johnson writes that, “Other newspapers asserted that
he was no gentleman, that he was a mercenary scoundrel, that he
was abusing the hospitality of the United States by uttering any
such criticism of his hosts, that he had malignantly come to the
country with that purpose. Anonymous letters echoed these attacks
in every key of scurrility.”
Far from being chastised, American book publishers
convened in Boston—where they called upon Congress to impose
a tariff on foreign books, and made the remarkable claim that
to let English writer retain control over their own works would
make it impossible “for American editors to alter and adapt
them to American taste.”
Even
Dickens began to realize that this was a fight he could not win,
sarcastically mimicking his hosts in private: “The Americans
read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what
more would he have? As to telling them they will have
no literature of their own, the universal answer (out of Boston)
is, ‘We don’t want one. Why should we pay for one
when we can get it for nothing. Our people don’t think of
poetry, sir. Dollars, banks, and cotton are our books, sir.’”
The
whole fight seemed to jaundice how Dickens viewed the raw young
nation, and many Americans were stung by his American Notes, an
account of his journey published a few months after his return
to England, and by his characterizations of America in the subsequent
novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Newspaper reviews of American
Notes castigated him as a “flash reporter” with the
sensibility of “a low-bred scullion unexpectedly advanced
from the kitchen to the parlour.” James Bennett’s
New York Herald pilloried the book as “all leather
and prunella,” and its author as “that famous penny-a-liner,”
with “the most coarse, vulgar, impudent, and superficial
mind…”
This
set new standards in gall—as the Herald had been
the chief pirate of American Notes. Bennett’s pressmen
sold 50,000 copies of the book in two days time—without
so much as a dime going to that “famous penny-a-liner.”
Yet time, and Americans’ unquenchable thirst
for Dickens’s work, would heal all these wounds. Twenty-five
years later he returned to these shores—and was treated
to another rapturous reception. By that time, too, Dickens had
found a way to reap at least some of the rewards for his work—a
series of some seventy-six lectures and readings, which netted
him the equivalent of $1.5-$2 million in today’s money from
his ecstatic U.S. fans.
Many of his American brethren were not so fortunate.
It was not until 1891 that an international copyright law was
finally passed, and by then Poe had long since tumbled into alcoholism,
and fatal despair, and Herman Melville had largely ceased to write.
We can only conjecture as to how many other literary careers were
stunted or abandoned altogether, thanks to the shortsighted greed
of American publishers.
Surely,
in the age of the internet, we can come up with some arrangement
that will compensate even writers for their work. For instance,
most of the data about the theft of Harry Potter I took from a
New York Times article, by Amy Harmon, that I found on-line—and
for which I paid $2.95. Fair enough?
