Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/389

Rh COPYRIGHT 859 hire any book first composed or written or printed and published in the United Kingdom, and reprinted else where, under penalty of forfeiture and a fine of 10. The proprietor of any encyclopaedia, review, magazine, periodical work, or work published in a series of books or parts, who shall have employed any person to compose the same, or any volumes, parts, essays, articles, or portions thereof, for publication on the terms that the copyright therein shall belong to such proprietor, shall enjoy the term of copyright granted by the Act. 1 But the proprietor may not publish separately any article or review without the author s con sent, nor may the author unless he has reserved the right of separate publication. Where neither party has reserved the right they may publish by agreement, but the author at the end of twenty-eight years may publish separately. Proprietors of periodical works shall be entitled to all the benefits of registration under the Act, on entering in the registry the title, the date of first publication of the first volume or part, and the names of proprietor and publisher. The interpretation clause of the Act defines a book to be every volume, part, or division of a volume, pamphlet sheet of letter-press, sheet of music, map, chart, or plan separately published The Act is not to prejudice the rights of the universities and the colleges of Eton, West minster, and Winchester. The Copyright Act was the result of a Parliamentary movement conducted by Mr Sergeant Talfourd and after wards by Lord Mahon. Talfourd s bill of 1841 proposed to extend copyright to a period of sixty years after the author s death. The proposer based his claim on the same grounds as other property rights, which would of course, as Macaulay pointed out, go to justify a perpetual copyright, He refused to accept any shorter term than sixty years. He was answered by Macaulay in a speech full of brilliant illustration and superficial argument. If copyright is to be regarded, as Macaulay regarded it, as a mere bounty to authors, -a tax imposed upon the public for the encourage ment of people to write books, his opposition to an extended term is not only justified, but capable of being applied to the existence of the right for any period whatever. The system of bounty, or of taxation for the special benefit of any class of citizen, is condemned by the principles of political economy and the practice of modern legislation. But if copyright is defended on the same principles which protect the acquisitions of the individual in other lines of activity, the reasoning of Macaulay and the opponents of perpetuity is altogether wide of the mark. The use of the phrase perpetual copyright has caused much confusion. A perpetual copyright is precisely the same sort of right, in respect of duration, as a fee-simple in land, or an investment in consolidated bank annuities. When Macaulay therefore says, &quot;Even if I believed in a natural right of property inde pendent of utility and anterior to legislation, I should still deny that this right could survive the original proprietors,&quot; his argument applies equally to property in land and in bank annuities. The original purchaser of a bank annuity acquires a right to the receipt of a certain sum every year for ever, and such right he may assign or bequeath to any body he chooses. The writer of a book, if the law recognized a perpetual copyright, would acquire an exclusive right to the profits of its publication for ever, and might assign or bequeath that right as he chose. In both cases the right survives the owner if indeed such a phrase can properly be used at all. Again, Macaulay points out that a copyright fifty years after one s death is at the present moment comparatively worthless : &quot; An advantage to be enjoyed half a century after we are dead, by somebody, we 1 Such articles must be paid for, in order to vest copyright in the proprietor of the periodical. know not whom, perhaps by somebody unborn, by somebody utterly unconnected with us, is really no motive at all to action.&quot; No doubt there is a point in the future at which a right coming into existence would for us now living be virtually worth nothing. But this is true of all rights, and not merely of the rights called copyright ; and this reason ing would justify the cutting off at some point in the- future of all individual rights of property whatever. The present value of a right to rent, a right to annuities, and a copyright to arise a hundred years hence is probably next to nothing. There may be good reasons for saying now that no such perpetuity of right ought to be recognized, that the state ought to pass a law to take for itself all profits arising out of land, and all annuities from the public funds, from and after the year 1977. The injury done to the present owners would be precisely of the same sort and extent as in the case of a copyright being cut short a hundred years hence. Macaulay asks, &quot; Would a copyright for sixty years have roused Dr Johnson to any vigorous effort, or sustained his spirits under depressing circumstances 1&quot; A sixty years copyright, or a perpetual copyright, would have been to Dr Johnson in his last days of the same value as a sixty years lease or a fee-simple respectively of property yielding the same amount of income.. Again, says Macaulay, the property would be certain to leave the author s family; the monopoly wouW fall into the hands of a bookseller. The same thing may be said of all property that is assignable ; and if there h any good reason for preventing the assignment of property in certain circumstances, whether by a law of entail or otherwise, that reason may be urged in the case of copy right with the same force, and only with the same force, as in the case of land. The old animus against the book seller is still apparent in such objections as the last. A. former Copyright Act, as we have already noticed, gavo the author two periods of fourteen years, the second to be conditional on his surviving the first. The object of this enactment is evidently to prevent the copyright from falling into the hands of a bookseller. The legislature appears to have deemed authors incapable of managing their own affairs. To prevent them from being made the victims of unscrupulous publishers they put it out of their power to assign the entire copyright, by making the second period a mere contingency. It was forgotten that future profits have a present money value, and that if an author sells his copyright for its fair market value, as he surely may be left to do, he reaps the advantage of the entire period of copyright as completely as if he remained the owner to the end. From this point of view the condition attached to the second period was a positive hardship to the author, inasmuch as it gave him an uncertain instead of a certain interest. It is the difference between an assignable annuity for a certain period of twenty-eight years, and two assign able annuities for fourteen years the second only to come into existence if the original annuitant survives the first period. The same fallacy lurks under Talfourd s complaint that as copyright is usually drawing towards an end at the close of the author s life, it is taken away at the very time when it might be useful to him in providing for his family. But if the period fixed is otherwise a fair period, the future of the author s family is an irrelevant consideration. Ho has, by supposition, the full property rights to which he is entitled, and he may sell them or otherwise deal with them as he pleases, and he will make provision for his family as other men do for theirs. Nothing short of a strict Entail Act can keep copyright, any more than other property, in his or his family s possession. The attempt to do this by making the latter portion of the period conditional has disappeared from legislation, but the same fallacy remains in the objections urged against long terms of copyright.