Robert Spoo. Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain. New York: Oxford UP, 2013. 384 pp. $35.00 cloth.

Robert Spoo's Without Copyrights lucidly unpacks the evolving story of modernisms engagement with copyright and piracy in the American public domain, relying on decades ofliterary and legal erudition, practice, and pedagogy. Delivered in the fresh and exciting prose of a scholar emerging triumphantly from the archives, Spoo offers a perspective that alters our perceptions of modernist authorship and production, asking us to rethink copyright in the present day, and fundamentally reframing some of modernisms canonical heroes. He reveals James Joyce's self-righteous and opportunistic campaign to crush the reputation of irreverent, yet well-intentioned Samuel Roth, pirate of Ulysses, while Roth--small-time publisher and promoter of what Spoo calls "libidinous confections of the avant-garde" (11)--emerges as a not-to-be-forgotten protagonist. In between is Round, key theorist of copyright reform, who refuses to sign the protest against Roth and testify against him.

Keywords: transatlantic modernism / piracy / publishing / copyright / Samuel Roth / James Joyce / Ezra Pound

**********

To any fan of modernism, the experience of reading Robert Spoo is that of listening to a master storyteller. Without Copyrights reads like exciting fiction from cover to cover. It is only at the end that the reader realizes how much specialized legal and historical information has been absorbed, and how convincing and relevant Spoo's understanding of copyright theory is.

The central story of this book--stemming, in part, from Spoo's work on the Samuel Roth papers at Columbia University--places Roth as a new figure at the center of modernism's first unauthorized forays into the American public domain. James Joyce, commonly perceived as the lauded champion of artistic freedom, is shown taking Roth to court to garner authorial celebrity rather than out of moral or artistic principles. Yet this decentering cannot be appreciated without a thorough understanding of what piracy actually meant in modernism's formative phase. Thus Spoo characterizes his method as "sociolegal and interdisciplinary, historical in mood, narrative in style, and grounded in three decades of literary and legal study and more than a decade of practicing and teaching law" (4). Indeed, he seamlessly interweaves an erudite account of legal copyright and intellectual property history with fascinating episodes formative to literary modernism, ultimately illustrating to what extent piracy defined modernism's consumption in the United States.

Spoo explains how well into the twentieth century, literary piracy did not mean what it means today. Alongside the more traditional sense of piracy was an alternative type that entailed legally sanctioned reprinting of foreign texts without copyrights in the United States. Protectionist copyright laws going as far back as the 1790 Copyright Act sought to buttress the burgeoning American public domain by tacitly encouraging reprints as a means of cultural diffusion. Whereas the 1790 Act left non-US citizens unprotected, the 1831 copyright law reaffirmed this exclusion and expanded the law's reach to include other emerging media. While the laws changed to further protect the rights of American authors, no protection...