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From: donn@sdchema.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.flame
Subject: Re: Copyright, Mark Twain, and the search for Truth
Message-ID: <1123@sdchema.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 9-Apr-84 00:15:28 EST
Article-I.D.: sdchema.1123
Posted: Mon Apr  9 00:15:28 1984
Date-Received: Wed, 11-Apr-84 04:19:49 EST
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Larry@harvard (sorry, Larry, someone upstream from us strips full names
out of 'From:' lines in news headers -- that's one reason why I always
sign everything):

It's interesting that you and TC Wheeler happened to pick on Mark Twain
(Samuel Clemens) for your examples, since his opinions on the subject
of copyrights were very vehement and are deserving of treatment in this
newsgroup...  I will follow in the tradition of the net and earn the
ire of poor Clemens' ghost by quoting some of his rantings on the
subject of copyrights from THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF MARK TWAIN (Charles
Neider, ed.; p. 306):

	'... If you could prove that only twenty idiots are born in a
	century and that each of them, by special genius, was able to
	make an article of commerce which no one else could make; and
	which was able to furnish the idiot and his descendants after
	him an income sufficient for the modest and economical support
	of half a dozen persons, there is no Congress and no Parliament
	in all Christendom that would dream of descending to the
	shabbiness of limiting that trifling income to a term of years,
	in order that it might be enjoyed thereafter by persons who had
	no sort of claim upon it.  I know that this would happen
	because all Congresses and Parliaments have a kindly feeling
	for idiots and a compassion for them, on account of personal
	experience and heredity.  Neither England nor America has been
	able to produce in a century any more than twenty authors whose
	books have been able to outlive the copyright limit of
	forty-two years [written in 1906 -- DMS], yet the Congresses
	and the Parliaments stick to the forty-two-year limit greedily,
	intensely, pathetically, and do seem to believe by some kind of
	insane reasoning that somebody is in some way benefited by this
	trivial robbery inflicted upon the families of twenty authors
	in the course of a hundred years. ...

	'In a century we have produced two hundred and twenty thousand
	books; not a bathtub-full of them are still alive and
	marketable.  The case would have been the same if the copyright
	limit had been a thousand years.  It would be entirely safe to
	make it a thousand years and it would also be properly
	respectable and courteous to do it.'

I suffer from the usual intellectual laziness of net contributors and
offer the following comment on TC Wheeler's remarks in the absence of
sure knowledge, in the hope and expectation that someone who really
does know will correct me.  What Clemens did to circumvent the
copyright laws is to put aside some of his writing and by the terms of
his will require that it be parceled out at periods following his
death.  Since the copyright dates from the time a work is first
published, this posthumous publishing can provide an income to his
estate and heirs.  Some of Clemens' best work is still unpublished...

Still hoping that Phil Dick will finish Clemens' novel THE GREAT DARK,

Donn Seeley    UCSD Chemistry Dept.       ucbvax!sdcsvax!sdchema!donn