Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/182

170 Q. You will no doubt perceive, with regard to your own works, that under the present system a time will come when your executors, or those who come after you, will be debarred from protection in the publication of all your works, although they will be protected in the publication of a part?

A. Certainly.

Q. Does not that appear to you to be inconvenient?

A. I think so, very.

You say that you think that a book, being the investment of a man's capacity and knowledge and time, is as much his property as any other property, and that the right of an author extends as far as the right of any person to any property whatever. I only want to ask you to point out what, of course, must have occurred to you, that there is a distinction between a book which conveys ideas and a machine which embodies them in a form which cannot be carried away or altered; and I would ask, considering the fact that supposing you write a book, another man, without stealing your book can steal all your ideas, and adapt and use them, whether there is not, therefore, a distinction between the property in a book and the property in any other thing?

A. No; I do not think that the property in a man's book consists in the ideas. I should limit his property entirely to the particular form in which he chooses to clothe those ideas. If you come to look into the matter carefully, it would be very hard to say how far the ideas contained in a man's book are his own; he owes them very largely to his ancestors and his surroundings, and to other people, and I do not think that is at all clear that you would be justified in laying an embargo upon a particular set of ideas because they happened to be contained in a particular book. My contention for the protection of property in books is entirely with regard to the particular form in which the author chooses to put his ideas.

Q. Supposing that, instead of writing a book, a man gives a series of lectures, for instance, as you do—fortunately for England—and that those lectures are reported, or that persons carry away in their memory the words and the essence of them, you admit that then, a man having chosen to disperse them to the world, neither on principle nor upon the grounds of expediency ought it to be held that those lectures are to be reserved for the man himself?

A. Certainly not the ideas or the facts; but I take it that a man has no right to publish a report of what he shall call my lecture; that is quite another thing: then he asserts that the form is mine as well as the substance. If he chooses to appropriate my ideas and himself publish them in any other form, and say, "This is what I think," I do not think that he should be prevented from doing so, and in my opinion he has a right to do it; but it is quite another matter if he calls anything which he chooses to publish my lecture.