Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain, by Robert Spoo, Oxford University Press, 355 pages, $35

What would happen if authors and publishers could not count on copyright to protect them from piracy? History hints at the answer. From the founding of the United States until well into the 20th century, domestic copyright laws generally denied foreign authors any form of legal redress. Yet as the legal scholar Robert Spoo explains in Without Copyrights, writers from other lands developed alternative strategies to recoup the costs of writing, producing, and marketing their works.

It wasn't simple, and it wasn't always pretty, but this informal system kept the American public well supplied with global literature. In Spoo's able recounting, moreover, it gave rise to some entertaining literary brawls and criminal obscenity.

Until the Chace Act was passed in 1891, only citizens and residents of the U.S. could qualify for American copyrights. Even after that, for another 60 years or so, domestic laws continued to deny copyrights to non-American authors who first manufactured or published their works abroad, or who failed to satisfy the stringent statutory formalities of U.S. copyright law. Few foreign authors bothered trying to run that legal gantlet; many who tried, failed. Through these openly protectionist provisions, U.S. copyright law subsidized domestic publishers, typesetters, printers, binders, and readers, while enriching the public domain with the works of foreign authors.

Spoo provides a considerable service simply by recreating that lost legal world, which cannot fail to seem bizarrely xenophobic to anyone familiar with how the law works now. (For the most part, copyrights today automatically apply across national boundaries.) But that merely sets...