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.
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