Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/181

Rh competent to form the slightest conception about it? What suggests itself to me is that the matter should be left to the ordinary operations of supply and demand. Why am I to be debarred from making any bargain I please with regard to a piece of literary property, otherwise than with regard to any other property?

Q. Does not it occur to you that no fixed percentage, let it range as it might, from five up to fifty per cent., could be fairly applicable to all classes of books?

A. Am I to understand that the proposition is to make one fixed percentage for all classes of books?

Q. As far as we have understood the proposition that is the proposition which has been made.

A. I can hardly conceive that that has been made as a serious proposition by anybody who knows anything about the writing of books; it is simply astonishing.

Q. You are aware of the present term of copyright?

A. Yes.

 Q. You are aware that the copyright for your works will probably not come to an end all at the same period, unless it should happen that you should live for a very long time after the completion of the last; for instance, that if you were to die say within the next fifteen, twenty, or thirty years, the copyright of your works would come to a close at various periods, the law being that each should have whichever was longest, forty-two years or seven years after life; and you may probably be aware, to take the instance of one author, that the earliest of Mr. Dickens's copyrights are running out, I believe, in this year, and that the latter of them will run on to, I think, the year 1912. Does it not occur to you that it would be desirable that property of this kind should come to its conclusion all at one and the same time?

A. Your question rather involves an opinion upon the propriety of terminating the copyright at all, and I am by no means satisfied that there is any ground for terminating a man's right to his property in books rather than in anything else.

Q. You are probably aware that the French term is fifty years after death, and the German thirty years after death?

A. Yes.

Q. And that therefore in Germany or in France the copyrights of an author will come to their conclusion at the same time?

A. Yes.

 Q. I will ask you whether you do not think that that mode is a better mode than the one which we have adopted. Putting aside the question whether an author's copyright should be perpetual, and assuming that the law will enact as it has enacted, that there shall be a term, would it not appear to you that a term similar to the French or the German term would be better than ours?

A. I think so, if you are to have a limit.