Is the principle of "International Copyright," so-called, correct? Let us look narrowly before we pronounce. At present this good country of ours makes itself a mocking and a by-word even to its own intelligent and art-loving citizens by putting a tariff-tax of 30% on paintings and statuary by foreign artists, not at all to get revenue thereby, but to "protect" domestic artists in their inferior work by artificially lifting the price of their wares. So far is carried this jealousy of foreign works of art, that when the artists generously loan them for exhibition on our national occasions, they are put under bonds _not to sell them on this side_ without previously paying the tariff-tax, which is graciously intermitted during the Exposition. This is Restriction. This is Protectionism pure and simple. This is legally excluding the Better in order to give a forced currency to the Worse. Now, domestic Copyright restricts the sale of any book to one publisher in his interest and in that of the author. The book now in the reader's hand is thus copyrighted. This legal arrangement between authors and publishers and their public may be perhaps logically defended, it may even be for the public weal on the whole, though in many cases it doubtless raises the price of good books, which would have been published without any such artificial encouragement. The copyright, however, like all patent-rights also, soon expires by limitation of time, and the public thereafter have the unrestricted use of what is really their own.
For what is sometimes called "literary property" is not property in the strict sense of the word. A book is not like a plough or a house. Its contents even when most original have been but colored, as it were, and rearranged and reinforced by the author's individual mind. Its substance always comes out of the common stock. It cannot be the author's own, as the bushel of wheat is the farmer's, who sowed the seed on his own land and threshed it in his own barn and carried it to market in his own wagon. The rights of the individual and the rights of the Community commingle more or less in private property of every kind, at least to the extent that the latter may tax the property if needful for the common wellbeing, as it is bound also legally to secure it to the owner when threatened by others; it is no part of the purpose of the present book to draw the wavering line in general between the rights of individuals and the rights of their Government as towards them; but the distinction between common property and copyrighted property is plain enough to everybody, and the Law puts emphasis on the distinction by making the one quickly terminable and the other continual. So then, when the Government under which the author resides, has given him a limited copyright within its own jurisdiction, it would seem as if the individual right in the premises had been sufficiently recognized alongside of the undoubted right of the Whole to the ultimate use of the labors of their own citizen.
