Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/184

172 A. No.

Q. Why, therefore, should you who have given a lecture, or have even written a lecture, if you choose to make it known in any way to other persons, have a right still to get a copyright for it?

A. The assumption in that argument, I think, is that the patent law is just: to that I venture to demur, in which case I need not follow out the parallel.

Q. I am advisedly not putting a question about the justice of it?

A. It is obvious that, if I do not admit the justice of a regulation in virtue of which a man who has published a design for a machine cannot obtain a patent for it, the rest of the argument does not affect me.

Q. Then you would put them all on the same footing?

A. Certainly.

Q. So that, really, to support the whole of your argument, you would be obliged to fall back upon this: that a man has a copyright in his ideas?

A. No; in the form into which he puts them. For example, in the case which you were suggesting to me just now, a man who makes a machine not only has an idea about his machine, but he embodies it in a particular form, with a certain application; and I think that is one of the great defects of the present patent law, that it has given protection to the idea in applications of which the original inventor never dreamed. I should restrict all protection of that kind to the precise result of a man's intellectual activity, that which is specially his own.

Q. Before we had a copyright law it was held, as you are probably aware, that if a man had embodied his ideas in the shape of a manuscript, that manuscript before he had handed it to a printer was his property, not merely the paper and the writing, but also all that was in it, that is to say, the form in which it was embodied, and that he could sell it to a publisher; but now there is an alteration in that: before a man hands his manuscript to a publisher he has a right to the ideas and to the form, but, after he has handed it to a publisher, and it is. published, then in virtue of the statute law he becomes entitled to a property in what you very properly call the form of the book. The result, after all, is that it has simply been adopted as a matter of expediency and of public policy that there should be conferred upon men who write books a certain right of obtaining a profit from them during a certain time. If your contention were correct with regard to the theory of a property in books and ideas, ought not the property to be a lasting one without any definite period?

A. Certainly; I have not a doubt of it.

Q. Then you would urge upon this commission that, when a man had put his ideas into the form of a book, the copyright in that book ought to exist forever?

A. I think that, as a matter of strict right, it should be so, but as a matter of expediency I do not think it is worth while asking for it; I