Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 14.djvu/192

180 A. Yes.

Q. And consequently that if the term of copyright was materially abridged, or if another publisher was allowed to reprint them by paying ten per cent, royalty, he could reprint those works at such a very much cheaper price than that of the original edition as to render it almost impossible for a person to obtain any profit from the original edition?

A. Not only by the mere process of copying, but it stands to reason that if anybody has provided woodcuts in an extensively illustrated work, even if those woodcuts are reëxecuted in wood by the best artists, it can be done at a far less cost for a copyist than for the original publisher, because the woodcut in the original book represents not merely the labor of the wood-cutter, but the labor of an artist who has been employed before the wood-cutter to make the drawing from which the wood-cutter makes his woodcut, and in all probability many hours' labor of the person who made the dissection, or whatever it was, which is there depicted.

Some questions, I believe, were asked you with respect to copyright in lectures?

A. Yes.

Q. Are you aware of what the practical protection afforded to lectures by the present law is?

A. I have understood that it is a very curious protection, and that you have, I think, to give notice to a justice of the peace.

Q. To two justices of the peace?

A. I should like to speak very strongly upon that point, because I myself have had occasion to feel the ill effects of the present practice. I think that it is a most iniquitous thing that a man who is admitted to a lecture should be able to print it with your name to it, and circulate it through the country with all the faults and imperfections arising out of the mode of reporting, without asking your leave or without your being able to restrain him.

Q. Having expressed the grievance which you feel, are you prepared to give the commission any suggestion as to the mode of removing that grievance?

A. I think that the simple and obvious course is to give a man absolute property in his lecture.

Q. But unless the public were informed in some way that that absolute property was given, might there not be injustice on the other side?

A. I do not think so; I think that the light of Nature ought to tell a man that he has no business to report a lecture and sell it without the permission of the person who gave the lecture. It does not require a very keen moral sense to see that that cannot be considered quite a right proceeding.

Q. But there are reporters and reporters. If a public lecture were given on a very interesting subject, I presume that the reporters of the