Mr. RANEY. That was revolutionary for that day, because it had been the universally accepted doctrine before that that the purpose of production was to create wealth. Now, if that can be the background of everything I can say this morning, and if you will be continually running back to that, if you will take that as the simple, wide road through the forest of the copyright literature, I think you will find, despite all the complexity of the testimony you have heard, that copyright, if you reduce it to its fundamentals, is relatively simple; and the practical counsel that will be given here today will be based upon the desire that you shall make your contribution at this time in a very simple enactment with all the rest not holding a candle to it.

We got off to an unfortunate start in our copyright legislation in the beginning. That can not be made too strong a statement, because, as compared with the rest of the world, when our initial enactment of 1790 was passed, we were even with those in the front rank; and, going still further back, the constitutional provision is the finest provision that exists anywhere; we need never blush in shame at all at the provision in our Constitution.

There are those who, if they had been frank in the hearings, would say to you, as they have said in private, that they think the constitutional provision represents a defeat for Thomas Jefferson, that Thomas Jefferson had been unduly under the influence of French philosophy, that he had been overawed by recent decisions in the House of Lords and that he wrote something in that constitutional provision that did him no credit-that he was woolgathering. You may believe that, but I do not. Let us read that provision:

The Congress shall have power

to promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

The first Congress picked that up and, as you see, there is a single provision for both patents and copyrights in that section, and introduced as House bill No. 10 in the second session, a measure that joined the two; but by the time enactment came in the spring of 1790, the two had gotten separated; the patent enactment was in Apríl, I believe, and the copyright enactment in May. But between those two grants there is a marked difference, that has had a profound influence on all subsequent legislation, which was destined to be all important in the fortunes of the man with a pen and his kinsman outside.

Patent was bestowed on "any person"; the copyright on "a citizen or resident " here. Anybody in the world could get a patent, no matter who he was or where he lived, provided only that he had an idea that was new and useful. But no book, however great its merit, could circulate in the United States under legal protection against thieves unless its author lived here. You would catch it if you took the traveller's clothes, but you might abduct the child of his brain and safely thumb your nose at him on the courthouse steps.

At first blush you would say that the American inventor got the worst of it in that deal because did he not have the whole world to compete with, whereas the product of the foreign rival of the

writer was thrown into the public domain for anybody to appropriate. In the case of an invention, if the foreigner beat you to it, he got the full profit out of it. There was no consolation or second prize. In the case of the book, however, not only was the is only the expression that is copyrighted, not the idea, we could foreign writer's material thrown into the public domain, but as it is only the expression that is copyrighted, not the idea, we could take the full benefit of his ideas. Nevertheless, in spite of that handicap, American inventive genius has gotten along well; witness the locomotive, steamboat, telegraph, electric light, telephone, phonograph, airplane, and motion pictures-to mention only eight major conveniences, for which the rest of the world has America to thank. After all, the way to swim is to jump into the water. Furthermore, our writers' seeming gain in having the exclusive protection of domestic law is only seeming, for an American publisher could just appropriate the work of an English genius, for example, without any cost to himself, no royalty to be paid; and, if he could do that, why should he lay out his good money on an American book? The answer is he did not, with the result that for a full century, during the heyday of the Victorian era, our publishers all over this country stole everything good that came out of England and let American literature languish.

Mr. DIES. There was no restriction on the publication of foreign works?

Mr. RANEY. No. As a matter of fact, the real significance of the two visits that Charles Dickens made to this country was the endeavor to arouse American genius on that score, to try to keep the American publishers from pirating British works. The British were the first to make an outcry against that. As early as 1837 a group of 56 distinguished British writers gave to Henry Clay a very dignified and effective protest against the habit of stealing the works of distinguished authors. This list embraced such names as BulwerLytton, Thomas Campbell, Thomas Carlyle, Benjamin Disraeli, Maria Edgeworth, Henry Hallam, Harriet Martineau, Henry H. Milman, Thomas Moore, and the poet laureate, Robert Southey. Clay tried four different times to get action, but the thing lay just dormant on the table at the end as it did at the beginning.

Then various campaigns by literary men were conducted from time to time, and our Presidents, one right after the other, made efforts. to break down that system. President Fillmore tried in 1853, Pierce in 1854, Arthur in 1881, and again in 1884; and Cleveland made four different efforts in 1886. As a matter of fact, when the International Copyright Union was formed in 1886, President Cleveland sent Mr. Solberg there as our representative.

Mr. SOLBERG. No, that was too early. I went there but not as a delegate.

Mr. RANEY. We did have delegates, however.

Mr. SOLBERG. No, but Mr. Winchester, who was our minister at Berne, was present but merely to listen.

Mr. RANEY. He made a report back, however?

Mr. SOLBERG. Yes, he did.

Mr. RANEY. This foolish thing, therefore, has been before us for 142 years as a part of that old blue law that still abides on our statute books. However, we have come, happily, to behave far better than

our law requires us to. Advance was made in the year 1891, when we repealed the requirement for American residence as a condition of copyright, but the foreigner still has, under that law, by the intervention of the manufacturing clause, to print his work here in order that we may recognize his title to his work; and in 1909 there was a further advance made in that works other than in English were excused from this requirement of American manufacture; but it is still a requirement of our law, no matter what we may do about it in practice, that if we are going to give legal protection to the circulation of a book in the English language, that book must have been made in the United States. I have the legal right to-day to take any English work published on the other side and reprint it without any compensation to the author and send it throughout the land, taking my full proceeds. The American law still allows that and we are unique in that particular.

Mr. DIES. That is, if the English author does not have it printed here.

Mr. RANEY. Those that are printed or reprinted here constitute a negligible percentage. Unless there is good business reason for it, unless it is a best seller so that a double edition will pay well, it is rarely ever done. That is to say, they do not feel under the necessity of doing it because we do not take advantage of the law; but still, the mere fact that that provision is still outstanding does keep us out of the literary family of nations.

Our major concern is not that we shall necessarily get into the International Copyright Union, although I think it would be a fine thing for us to do; but my concern is that this blot on our law shall be removed. Let us not make copyright dependent upon where the book is manufactured or upon compliance with any kind of formality, because, after all, a man's work is his own, wherever made. If, for example, we treated our property as we treat literary property, this might occur: I might lose this watch in my pocket, which happens to have a Swiss movement in it, and if that were treated as copyright material, there would not be any recovery of it, no punishment of the person who appropriated that watch, simply because the works were Swiss. That is an immoral position that the United States can not afford to take, regardless of what we are going to do about it. Whether we should go on and make application for membership in a union, and that we would clear the way for it, is another matter; but I think it is immensely important for the very selfish reason that we are now a very great reproducing Nation ourselves, that our authors, without having the necessity of complying with the minute regulations of a great number of countries abroad, shall, by a single printing here, get universal respect to their title, especially since, through American inventive ingenuity, there are so many other ways of using the author's work now besides the mere publication of it; and, as you know, the "Americanization of Europe" is a term that they are often quoting on the other side.

Now, while this struggle has been a long one in behalf of having the title to a work determined entirely upon authorship, and authorship only, it does not hold a candle to a very much longer contest that runs back to the invention of printing, in fact. It is true that the entire literature of Greece, Rome, and the Middle Ages was writ

ten without the slightest recognition of the right of the author to the multiplication of his copies.

Mr. DIES. In what period of history was copyright protection initiated?

Mr. RANEY. I was coming to that in my next statement. It was in 1710 that the first act was passed.

But it was the invention of the printing press that first called public attention to the importance of giving the author the control over multiplication of his copies, and that control came to be given in a very odd fashion: As a matter of fact, the enactment of the Statute of Anne, in the terms in which it appeared, was a fluke, a mere accident. What happened was that in the beginning of things with the invention of the printing press, both the throne and the church got frightened at the specter of a free press subversive of the existing order, and copyright was used as the means of censorship. It was important, both to the church and to the state, that they could control this new means of circulation, and the result was that very early the grants were given by the king, and to make sure that only the specific work should get out that he desired to get out, only privileged printers were allowed the right to do the printing. So, by 1556, there came to be formed a printers' guild known as the Stationers Company of London, which alone was allowed, under royal grant, the privilege of doing the printing. Its members had control of all manuscripts, and these manuscripts were passed among them and sold among them like chattels, they were bequeathed in wills, and licenses granted to this company would expire from time to time and they would have to appeal to Parliament for renewal. Finally, one of those renewals came up in 1694, and by that time the authors were beginning to get sore at the way they were being handled by the printers' guild and they had a say in government by that time, notably Dean Swift; so that, in answer to one of their appeals for the renewal of control of the printing press, there came out an act, to their intense surprise, which contained two main features: The first of them was that the grant was made thereafter, in the terms of that act, not to the printer but to the author, and in the second place it was made for the limited term of 14 years instead of in perpetuity. Those who had come and asked for bread had gotten a stone.

That was fought bitterly, of course, in the courts, through a prolonged period of time, and, in fact, it was not until a decision of the House of Lords in 1774 that finally it was settled, and apparently settled for all the world, that, in the first place, copyright was statutory, nothing inherent about it; and, in the second place, it should be for a limited term.

Our Constitution appeared, as you know, in 1787, and these two features were embodied in that section which I have just given you, and for all time copyright presumably is statutory, and for a limited term. That has run the gamut of court action in this country as well, and by a similar ruling of our own Supreme Court in 1834 those two features were fixed for America as the law.

Mr. DIES. Under our decisions, we do not recognize the author's right as a natural right.

Mr. RANEY. No, sir; it is all statutory.

Mr. DIES. It seems to me that there is some confusion in language in the decisions, but it occurs to me from reading several of the Supreme Court decisions that it is pretty well established that it is a statutory right, a privilege granted by society.

Mr. RANEY. That is true-It is a privilege granted by society— As a matter of fact, that idea of perpetual copyright has been very slow dying, even after the Supreme Court decision of 1834, and as late as 1900 a very famous Senator of the United States, now dead, introduced a measure making the copyright term 1,000 years, but it was quickly seen to be in opposition to the spirit of the Constitution and they got nowhere with it, not even out of committee.

There are other claims, less defensible, that more recently have been advanced by publishers to control the disposal of books. For example, several suits were fought out in the first decade of this century through the Supreme Court on the claim that the publisher could fix the price of resale by notice without privity of contract. Those suits came to a disastrous conclusion. A book would have on the title page something to the effect that "This book sells for $1" and they sought to stop somebody who was willing to sell it for 90 cents. That was tested in the Supreme Court, as I have said, and was denied by unanimous decision.

This present Congress, like any number preceding, has before it a claim of the American publishers, often made and often rejected, that they wish to control the entrance of British publications into the United States, and find themselves as usual opposed by the most serious users of foreign books, the educational institutions and scientific organizations of the country. Under the act now in force, if an American book is reprinted abroad, legitimately or not, that reprint can not be imported here except in single copies by educational institutions, for use and not for sale, and by others only by consent of the American copyright owner. If the American book is printed here, and a reprint has been gotten abroad, those reprints, no matter whether low priced or high priced, can not be stocked by an American seller on this side, for the purpose of selling them in this country, because it would interfere with the sale of the original edition. Mr. DIES. You have no objection to that?

Mr. RANEY. Not at all.

The educational institution is allowed the right to get one, and this they do, but not for sale; but if an individual wanted one, he would have to get the consent of the copyright proprietor, whether that would be the author or publisher, and that protection is perfectly just.

Again, if a foreign publication in English is reprinted here to get our copyright, the present law allows anyone to import the original for use but not for sale. The publishers condemn this, for they say copyright means exclusive control and a control of a territory for a title is not exclusive if a resident in it can buy that title outside. There is double error here, for, in the first place, the "exclusive right" in the Constitution is aimed at pirates, not assigns; and, second, exclusive right does not mean absolute right.

The purpose of copyright legislation the world over is to prevent infringement; that is, to stop unauthorized publication. Society's sole obligation to the writer is to bar the thief from his plant. The aim of copyright is to foster public education. Once the author is