guaranteed sole possession of his work the legislature will regulate his use of it as it does any other property. It is not an inherent right but a privilege granted.

That proposal of controlling the entry of an English original that has been reprinted here has come down in recent years to this form, not to the claim of absolute prohibition of entry of the original, but to have the importation made through the hands of the one who has the American rights. What are the objections to that plan, because presumably that is the one that has appeared in the hearings, although I was not here to hear it? In the first place, it is a perversion of the true copyright idea, which aims solely to protect the author against piracy. Originals should have free course. Forbidding the trade the importation of British originals reprinted here, as prescribed in the present law, was an incident of the manufacturing clause, and when the latter is abrogated the former should disappear with it. Then, reprinting is uneconomical. It makes jobs but it does not lower the cost of books.

Third, forcing our patronage by law is unnecessary. If prices are equalized we shall generally come to the American counter without compulsion.

Fourth, their proposed control of foreign originals in English has no counterpart in legislation abroad. That is very frequently disputed and the English law is cited. A frequent example is this: That it is well enough known that there is in Germany a firm by the name of Tauchnitz that issues cheap reprints of British and American books, and that under the terms of the contract that that publisher has with American and British authors and their assigns, those reprints can not come back to England and the United States for competition with the originals, and that is cited as a parallel to what I am here saying, but it is just exactly the opposite. There what is being provided is to see to it that a foreign reprint does not come back home in competition with the home product. Tauchnitz, on record in hearings, has stated that while he has the printing rights for Germany for these American books, any other American printer can print them, and he has no control whatsoever of the entrance into Germany of British and American originals. Not only can an individual or an institution bring the book in there, but the trade can stock them, and his right is in the fact that he prints a cheap copy; he has merely the printing rights.

In England the provision is precisely the same, although the language is not the same in the United States. Under the English law-and I have the text of her law here before me-England does what America does: First, it bars foreign reprints of British books entirely; and, second, it bars from the trade originals reprinted in England; third, it counts as infringement only an importation under the second provision that I have just outlined, for sale or hire, allowing by unanimous court decision importations under this second provision for use. And England is followed by Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland, and South Africa, while Canada specifically permits importation of any work in the International Copyright Union. So, the Swiss, of 1922, allows free course to all authorized issues, whether original or reprint. Belgium penalizes only the importation of an illicit edition for commercial purposes. And,

as I have already said, Tauchnitz, with continental printing rights, states that the British and American originals he reprints have open road to Germany for anybody that orders them whether for use or sale. The law of other countries is silent, as are the codes of the Pan American Convention, to which we subscribe, as well as the Berne Convention, to which we do not.

Fifth, the proposal could not be enforced. In the whole copyright term one could not safely order a book, old or new, from an English list without first ascertaining whether there has been an American edition. Only the Copyright Office will know. Then you would have to ask the publisher if the reprint is still in stock. The customs officials must get the same information when the book reaches port. It could not be done, as said by a Treasury official about a similar proposal 19 years ago; there would be just enough show of enforcement for constant irritation.

Sixth, the game is not worth the candle. Scholars, scientists, and librarians who import are not interested in best sellers. These would continue to be brought here. Their kind of books would not generally, and need never be reprinted. The loss of their small orders for the original of reprints would be insignificant, besides the hampering of their work if every book in English that they needed had to be treated like real estate, with title searched in Washington to escape conviction for smuggling. The publishers are here trying to force the world into sealed compartments, a publisher to each, while the inventive spirit of the age is leaping barriers and getting the race together under a common rooftree. Give wise men and their books free course and they will make returns one hundred fold.

This is now March. The session will be adjourning in four month's time. You have a great mass of testimony before you on proposals running all the way from the simple suggestion that we qualify for membership in the International Copyright Union to a general revision of the whole statute. This is an extremely busy session in other ways, and it seems to me that the only thing to do is to put down in a very simple list the things that are the matter with the present law, arranging them in the order of their importance, and killing them off one after another in such time as you have in this session, leaving to some future time the consideration of revision of the entire statute.

Now, in the order of their importance, certain it is that we should remove from the American escutcheon that which denies a man who writes in the English language the title to his work unless that work is produced on American soil. We stand absolutely alone in the world in that particular. We did not start, as I say, behind other countries; we started abreast of them. But within three years after our original enactment, France had taken an important step forward under the spur of the French Revolution, and in 1793 set the precedent of granting, irrespective of the residence or nationality, copyright to anyone publishing a book on her soil. In 1852 she took a still longer lead by decreeing against republication of works first published abroad without regard to reciprocity.

I referred to the fact that Henry Clay in 1834 had presented a petition of British authors against the permission given under our law to pirate English works, but at the very time this petition was

presented to the United States Senate, British law was no better. The fact was that British literature was rich at that time and was worth pirating, and they thought that we did not have much to pirate. But, so far as the laws were concerned, they were parallel, and it took a court decision in 1868 to establish the applicability to nonresidents of the Act of 1842 which allowed a book first published in the United Kingdam-England, Scotland, Wales, and Irelandto bear copyright throughout the British units, while not until 1886 was such protection first given to a book elsewhere than in those dominions; and it was in 1887 that the International Copyright Union came and under that single provision is that you comply with the copyright law of any country that is a member of the union-there are now 37 of them-and you get automatic protection throughout all the countries members of that union. Under reciprocal treaties, you get just what you give you get as much protection as you give under this law, and under these reciprocal treaties, if you are taking advantage of the treaty abroad, you must comply with the statute of that country and that would hold all the way down the line.

Mr. RICH. Has our country been the loser by not having the benefit of these reciprocal treaties that other countries enjoy, or have our people been what we might call the gainers, although they might be classed as pirates?

Mr. RANEY. I have said that piracy practically is dead. We are allowed under the law to pirate but we do not. What we have been doing instead is entering into reciprocal relations with each individual country, and we are giving precisely what we get; but piracy is not practiced on either side.

Mr. RICH. It is not practiced in this country to-day?

Mr. RANEY. Not any more than abroad. Mr. Solberg might be inclined to deny that fact, and he may want to speak on that point. Of course, the point is that by membership in the International Copyright Union, the single act of complying with the law of your own country, without having to have an attorney engaged in all of the countries of Europe, gives you automatic protection under the laws of that union without having to inquire what that protection is or how you would comply with it. It is the simplicity of getting this international protection that membership in this union gives us, but our prime concern should be not confusing the two issues. Our prime concern should be to remove the blot from our own law. Whether or not we get anywhere else, we should take that step for to deny the author the title to his work unless he complies with certain formalities of our law here is an immoral position."

Mr. DIES. Does that provision bring any amount of business to the American printers? I notice that quite a number of English works are printed in America now, are they not?

Mr. RANEY. The percentage is constantly decreasing, and I do not think that going in or staying out of the International Copyright Union would change that percentage any more.

Mr. DIES. Is not America one of the biggest markets in the world for books?

Mr. RANEY. It certainly is.

Mr. DIES. Do not many English authors sell more of their works in the United States than they do in England?

Mr. RANEY. That is notably true, of course, in Canada, where the American market is much more to be looked at than the local Canadian market. Any Canadian author that would want to get a wide sale would look more carefully at the American market than the Canadian market.

Mr. DIES. Is not that true of England? Do not the English authors realize more from the publication of their works here in the United States than in England?

Mr. RANEY. Of course, the English-speaking world is the market for all of these works. That is what has given encouragement to production on both sides, that you have this far-spread use of the English language that no other language has. But let us first remove this blot in our law; it is a thing that we can not permanently let stand on our statute books because it is an immoral provision. Whether you should go on further, after having cleared that blot away, and join an international union is a question for us to look at from the point of view of whether it would be of advantage

to us.

Mr. DIES. Do you not think that we ought to have a little information on what effect it would have on American labor engaged by the various printing houses? As far as I am concerned, I do not know what effect it would have, but, just from observation, I notice that a great many English authors print their books in the United States, and, of course, that furnishes employment for a great many Americans. If we should say that they could print their works in England and sell them without restriction in the United States, I was wondering what effect that would have? Of course, getting down to the basic fact, it occurs to me that it is not more immoral to have such a provision as that than it is to have tariff barriers. It is all predicated upon the assumption that you want to protect American industry and American labor from foreign competition; at least, that is my idea.

Mr. RANEY. You have introduced an important element there that we need to clarify.

Mr. RICH. I think it is essential that we see we are going to maintain our standard of living.

Mr. RANEY. Of course, that is a tariff question but not a copyright question. The way to handle that is to remove the stain from our law which says that a man's title to his work is not recognized, and punish him in some other way; punish him by a duty. As a matter of fact, I can say that I myself am the author, the one who first suggested the present very interesting provision of a tariff law. I came to conference with the officials of the American Federation of Labor, notably Matthew Woll, to find out what was the basis of having in the case of the tariff act then being considered, 1922, duties to the standard of earlier years, and he claimed that the purpose was to prevent American publishers from sending American manuscripts abroad to be published. Whether it was true or not, he said he had evidence that two or three well-known American houses were operating plants on foreign soil and that ought to be stopped. I said: "If that is what you are after, then I am entirely with you, but there is a practical way of doing that, and that is a discriminatory rate, and you do not need to knock down the whole line to get at that difficulty, but just make it impossible

by tariff provision. Put a duty on so high that it will be prohibitive, if you like "—and the result was the present tariff law with that discriminatory rate made at my suggestion. The figure is 15 per cent for a bona fide English work written by an Englishman and published on his soil but 25 per cent for the American book

Mr. DIES. Do the recent tariff schedules adopted by England contain any provision with reference to American books?

Mr. RANEY. I do not think so. They never have had a duty on books.

Mr. DIES. Do you know, Mr. Rich?

Mr. RICH. No, I do not; but I think the suggestion made by the gentleman in reference to the tariff is a good one.

Mr. RANEY. I said; "So far as that might be concerned, that duty might be prohibitive; you could have it 100 per cent."

Mr. RICH. That is one thing that is happening, not only in the line of publication, but in other things, that Americans are going abroad and locating plants and then having the products of those plants come into this country; and they are here fighting for reduction of tariffs where they allow foreign labor to receive the benefits and our people are not protected.

Mr. GOODWIN. You would not say that we could make the tariff so high as to be entirely prohibitory, would you?

Mr. RANEY. You see, I do not press that: I say it can be done. What I mean to say is there is your machinery

Mr. GOODWIN. But that would not be practical.

Mr. DIES. That would cause retaliation immediately.

Mr. GOODWIN. Certainly.

Mr. DIES. Whenever we adopt any such provision, the other countries build a Chinese wall around their nation.

Mr. RANEY. Let us get the two lines of thought completely separate. The way to prevent the American manuscript from going abroad is to make the rate high in the tariff schedule.

Mr. GOODWIN. If we enter the International Copyright Union on the basis of the Rome convention, we would have to forego this provision that all books sold in the United States must be printed within the United States, would we not?

Mr. RANEY. So far as the foreign author is concerned, yes; not so far as the American author is concerned; that is to say, you can do precisely what you please with your own authors under this law. Mr. GOODWIN. I am referring to foreign authors who desire to have their books published in the United States. We would have to forego that provision if we entered the International Copyright Union on the basis of the Rome convention?

Mr. RANEY. Yes; or any other. As a matter of fact

Mr. DIES. What would be the effect if we did amend the law and then proceeded through the tariff? Would not they have the same objection to our entrance into the Union if we raised the tariff barriers?

Mr. RANEY. No, no, that is tariff business, and the copyright business and the tariff business are wholly separate. You can do what you please under a tariff and it does not affect your entrance into the International Copyright Union.

As a matter of fact, I think it is already true that this matter of printing and reprinting has reached the point of being purely sta