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COPYRIGHT
With Mr. Howells, Edward Everett Hale, Thomas Nelson Page, and
a number of other authors, Mr. Clemens appeared before the
committee December 6, 1906. The new Copyright Bill
contemplated an author's copyright for the term of his life and
for fifty years thereafter, applying also for the benefit of
artists, musicians, and others, but the authors did most of the
talking. F. D. Millet made a speech for the artists, and John
Philip Sousa for the musicians.
Mr. Clemens was the last speaker of the day, and its chief
feature. He made a speech, the serious parts of which created
a strong impression, and the humorous parts set the Senators
and Representatives in roars of laughter.
I have read this bill. At least I have read such portions as I could
understand. Nobody but a practised legislator can read the bill and
thoroughly understand it, and I am not a practised legislator.
I am interested particularly and especially in the part of the bill which
concerns my trade. I like that extension of copyright life to the
author's life and fifty years afterward. I think that would satisfy any
reasonable author, because it would take care of his children. Let the
grandchildren take care of themselves. That would take care of my
daughters, and after that I am not particular. I shall then have long
been out of this struggle, independent of it, indifferent to it.
It isn't objectionable to me that all the trades and professions in the
United States are protected by the bill. I like that. They are all
important and worthy, and if we can take care of them under the Copyright
law I should like to see it done. I should like to see oyster culture
added, and anything else.
I am aware that copyright must have a limit, because that is required by
the Constitution of the United States, which sets aside the earlier
Constitution, which we call the decalogue. The decalogue says you shall
not take away from any man his profit. I don't like to be obliged to use
the harsh term. What the decalogue really says is, "Thou shaft not
steal," but I am trying to use more polite language.
The laws of England and America do take it away, do select but one class,
the people who create the literature of the land. They always talk
handsomely about the literature of the land, always what a fine, great,
monumental thing a great literature is, and in the midst of their
enthusiasm they turn around and do what they can to discourage it.
I know we must have a limit, but forty-two years is too much of a limit.
I am quite unable to guess why there should be a limit at all to the
possession of the product of a man's labor. There is no limit to real
estate.
Doctor Bale has suggested that a man might just as well, after
discovering a coal-mine and working it forty-two years, have the
Government step in and take it away.
What is the excuse? It is that the author who produced that book has had
the profit of it long enough, and therefore the Government takes a profit
which does not belong to it and generously gives it to the 88,000,000 of
people. But it doesn't do anything of the kind. It merely takes the
author's property, takes his children's bread, and gives the publisher
double profit. He goes on publishing the book and as many of his
confederates as choose to go into the conspiracy do so, and they rear
families in affluence.
And they continue the enjoyment of those ill-gotten gains generation
after generation forever, for they never die. In a few weeks or months
or years I shall be out of it, I hope under a monument. I hope I shall
not be entirely forgotten, and I shall subscribe to the monument myself.
But I shall not be caring what happens if there are fifty years left of
my copyright. My copyright produces annually a good deal more than I can
use, but my children can use it. I can get along; I know a lot of
trades. But that goes to my daughters, who can't get along as well as I
can because I have carefully raised them as young ladies, who don't know
anything and can't do anything. I hope Congress will extend to them the
charity which they have failed to get from me.
Why, if a man who is not even mad, but only strenuous--strenuous about
race-suicide--should come to me and try to get me to use my large
political and ecclesiastical influence to get a bill passed by this
Congress limiting families to twenty-two children by one mother, I should
try to calm him down. I should reason with him. I should say to him,
"Leave it alone. Leave it alone and it will take care of itself. Only
one couple a year in the United States can reach that limit. If they
have reached that limit let them go right on. Let them have all the
liberty they want. In restricting that family to twenty-two children you
are merely conferring discomfort and unhappiness on one family per year
in a nation of 88,000,000, which is not worth while."
It is the very same with copyright. One author per year produces a book
which can outlive the forty-two-year limit; that's all. This nation
can't produce two authors a year that can do it; the thing is
demonstrably impossible. All that the limited copyright can do is to
take the bread out of the mouths of the children of that one author per
year.
I made an estimate some years ago, when I appeared before a committee of
the House of Lords, that we had published in this country since the
Declaration of Independence 220,000 books. They have all gone. They had
all perished before they were ten years old. It is only one book in 1000
that can outlive the forty-two year limit. Therefore why put a limit at
all? You might as well limit the family to twenty-two children.
If you recall the Americans in the nineteenth century who wrote books
that lived forty-two years you will have to begin with Cooper; you can
follow with Washington Irving, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edgar Allan Poe,
and there you have to wait a long time. You come to Emerson, and you
have to stand still and look further. You find Howells and T. B.
Aldrich, and then your numbers begin to run pretty thin, and you question
if you can name twenty persons in the United States who--in a whole
century have written books that would live forty-two years. Why, you
could take them all and put them on one bench there [pointing]. Add the
wives and children and you could put the result on, two or three more
benches.
One hundred persons--that is the little, insignificant crowd whose bread-
and-butter is to be taken away for what purpose, for what profit to
anybody? You turn these few books into the hands of the pirate and of
the legitimate publisher, too, and they get the profit that should have
gone to the wife and children.
When I appeared before that committee of the House of Lords the chairman
asked me what limit I would propose. I said, "Perpetuity." I could see
some resentment in his manner, and he said the idea was illogical, for
the reason that it has long ago been decided that there can be no such
thing as property in ideas. I said there was property in ideas before
Queen Anne's time; they had perpetual copyright. He said, "What is a
book? A book is just built from base to roof on ideas, and there can be
no property in it."
I said I wished he could mention any kind of property on this planet that
had a pecuniary value which was not derived from an idea or ideas.
He said real estate. I put a supposititious case, a dozen Englishmen who
travel through South Africa and camp out, and eleven of them see
nothing at all; they are mentally blind. But there is one in the party
who knows what this harbor means and what the lay of the land means. To
him it means that some day a railway will go through here, and there on
that harbor a great city will spring up. That is his idea. And he has
another idea, which is to go and trade his last bottle of Scotch whiskey
and his last horse-blanket to the principal chief of that region and
buy a piece of land the size of Pennsylvania.
That was the value of an idea that the day would come when the Cape to
Cairo Railway would be built.
Every improvement that is put upon the real estate is the result of an
idea in somebody's head. The skyscraper is another idea; the railroad is
another; the telephone and all those things are merely symbols which
represent ideas. An andiron, a wash-tub, is the result of an idea that
did not exist before.
So if, as that gentleman said, a book does consist solely of ideas, that
is the best argument in the world that it is property, and should not be
under any limitation at all. We don't ask for that. Fifty years from
now we shall ask for it.
I hope the bill will pass without any deleterious amendments. I do seem
to be extraordinarily interested in a whole lot of arts and things that I
have got nothing to do with. It is a part of my generous, liberal
nature; I can't help it. I feel the same sort of charity to everybody
that was manifested by a gentleman who arrived at home at two o'clock in
the morning from the club and was feeling so perfectly satisfied with
life, so happy, and so comfortable, and there was his house weaving,
weaving, weaving around. He watched his chance, and by and by when the
steps got in his neighborhood he made a jump and climbed up and got on
the portico.
And the house went on weaving and weaving and weaving, but he watched the
door, and when it came around his way he plunged through it. He got to
the stairs, and when he went up on all fours the house was so unsteady
that he could hardly make his way, but at last he got to the top and
raised his foot and put it on the top step. But only the toe hitched on
the step, and he rolled down and fetched up on the bottom step, with his
arm around the newel-post, and he said:
"God pity the poor sailors out at sea on a night like this."
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