Robert Spoo

WITHOUT COPYRIGHTS

PIRACY, PUBLISHING, AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

MODERNIST LITERATURE & CULTURE

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2013

Robert spoo's lucid book focuses on the interesting story of how U.S. copyright law affected the transmission of modernist writing by European authors to the American public. Readers of the ILS will be particularly interested in the book's related account of the impact of American copyright law on twentieth-century Irish writing, both traditional and modernist.

The first United States copyright law in 1790 denied protection to foreign works. Openness to the world came slowly. For large parts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, writers from outside the United States had to contend with the protectionist provisions that characterized American copyright law from 1891 until the mid-twentieth century. Chief among them was the "manufacturing clause" of the 1891 Chace Act, which accorded U.S. copyright only to works that were typeset in America, and required that two copies of the work be deposited in the Copyright Office on or before the date of publication abroad. A revision of the Copyright Act in 1909 mitigated the blocking effect of the manufacturing clause by providing a method for a book first published abroad in the English language to obtain copyright protection in the United States. Specifically, the revised Act provided that if such a book were deposited in the Copyright Office not later than sixty days after its publication abroad, the author could obtain an "ad interim copyright" for a period of four months, which could be converted to full statutory copyright if the book was manufactured and published in the United States during the ad interim period. Full protection was contingent upon compliance with the general provisions of the statute requiring the deposit of copies, registration, filing of an affidavit, and printing of a copyright notice on the work.

Spoo assesses, often through the lens of the ubiquitous Ezra Pound, the pros and cons of these protectionist restrictions, which, even as ameliorated in 1909, made it sufficiently difficult for European authors to obtain an American copyright that much of their work was forced into the public domain in the United States. To the extent that American publishers seized the opportunity to publish these works, they were able to do so at prices reflecting the absence of an obligation to pay royalties to the author. Spoo welcomes the resulting widespread dissemination of foreign ideas at affordable prices, even as he laments the corresponding harm to an author's ability to profit from his or her writing. On the latter point, he admiringly and convincingly quotes Pound on the need for adequate copyright protection to preserve and protect the role of the author as ambassador of ideas between and among nations-what Pound called "an international communicator of necessary truths."

Pound thought that the early modernists' ability to perform this role was particularly hindered by American copyright law because American publishers, whose support was necessary to comply with the manufacturing clause, were unlikely to warm to the modernists' novel...