Overview

...a brilliant protagonist of the cultivated reader, at the Hearings of March, 1908, in the person of William Allen Jenner, a New York lawyer, speaking in his own name. Mr. Jenner had already got the ear of Congress by the private publication in 1907 of a masterly analysis of the bill entitled the publisher against the people, a plea for the defense, to be followed after the Hearings by The octopus, similarly issued. Under his penetrating probe, the proceedings broke up and turned into a general rat-hunt by all aboard. At the end, the importation right was back where it ought to be, the disposal section resumed its traditional tenor in the grant, To print, reprint, publish, copy, and vend the copyrighted work, and many other nests were cleared out. One last stand was yet to be made. The Supreme Court on June 1, 1908, had affirmed the lower court decisions in the Bobbs-Merrill and Scribner cases, even though in January, 1907, the publishers had changed their agreement to a recommendation, without, however, altering coercive practices. Thus the publisher could not by mere notice limit the price of resale, nor after the first vending exercise any further right. The final drive, made at the critical Hearing of Jan. 20, 1909, was in the effort to insert the following clause: That subject to the limitations and conditions of this act copyright secured hereunder shall be entitled to all the rights and remedies which would be accorded to any other species of property at common law. Here again appeared Mr. Jenner for the public, joined by Mr. Parkinson, who, as already seen, was still keeping his vigil in 1916. This clause was to revive an old claim of the Stationers' Company of London, which, under the aegis of the Star Chamber, carried so high a hand for a century and a half from its charter in 1556. Since 1710 when the Statute of Anne, the first copyright act, went into effect, all copyright in published works has been statutory. So finally decided the House of Lords in 1774. In this spirit the American Constitution was written and the Act of 1790 so construed by the Supreme Court in 1834 and repeatedly since. The effect of the clause would probably have been to upset the Bobbs-Merrill verdict. It failed, and the bill only when so amended was signed by President Roosevelt on the last day of his second term in 1909. The end of the American Publishers' Association came in 1914 with the payment of $140,000 in damages following the third unanimous verdict of the Supreme Court Dec. 1, 1913.... And now after all this history, with the fate of its sire full before its eyes, the young National Association of Book Publishers, our nativity greetings hardly dead on the air, dashes up on the old steed, with the prettiest trappings the best copyright saddler in America could give him, determined once more to stay the free flow of the world's thought our way, thus beggaring American art, science and scholarship to fill a private till. -Bulletin of the American Library Association, Volume 16 [1922]

Full Product Details

9781511943185

Table of Contents

Reviews

Author Information

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available