Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/183

Rh Q. Take the case of Fichte: when he was twelve years of age, if he heard a sermon or an address he could go away and repeat it verbally; you cannot prevent that?

A. Certainly not.

Q. He carries away the ideas, and carries away the whole thing: is he to be prevented from transferring it to anybody else?

A. He is to be prevented from putting it in the shape of a book, and selling it to the disadvantage of the person who has given the lecture or the sermon.

Q. Are you laying down a question of abstract principle, or is it merely one of expediency?

A. With regard to that particular case of lectures, it is a point on which I hold a very strong opinion indeed, I have seen the opinion advanced that a man who has given a lecture has given it to the world, in the same way that a man who has written or published a book has given it to the world, and that on the ground of his having given it to the world he cannot call it back again. I must confess that that strikes me as the strangest confusion between publication and donation. If I announce myself as ready to give a lecture to-morrow, to which persons may be admitted at a certain fee, I make a contract with the persons who come that, in consideration of their paying so much, they shall hear me speak for an hour, and that is all; I do not sell my right to print it and sell the lecture, and especially not my right to call it mine; the contract is a perfectly clear one. Take the case that I open a gallery of photographs, and that I say that people shall be admitted on paying a shilling each: I do not give to every person who comes there the right to copy my photographs and sell those copies himself; we see at once that that would be a preposterous supposition; and in the same way a person, who is admitted to my lecture on the understanding that he is to get his money's worth (if it be his money's worth, I do not say that it will be) in hearing me speak for an hour, does not thereby obtain the privilege of making a profit by printing it and calling it my lecture.

Q. But you admit that, even if you give a lecture to a limited audience, your ideas are thereby distributed?

A. I do not ask for any protection to ideas; it is the form of the thing which is mine.

Q, It is simply the matter of the form in which you embody your ideas, and it is for that that you claim protection?

A. Certainly.

Q. Is there not a very great distinction between the form literary and the form artistic or mechanical?

A. I really do not see where the distinction lies.

Q. Supposing that I have invented a machine, if I write an account of it to the Contemporary Review or the ForntightlyFortnightly [sic], or to any mechanical magazine, and it is published, after that I cannot get a patent for it?