International Copyright

This book was The International Copyright Considered in some of its Relations to Ethics and Political Economy. It had written about the questions relating to copyright belong naturally to the sphere of political economy. They have to do with the laws governing production, and with the principles regulating supply and demand; and they are directly dependent upon a due determining of the proper functions of legislation, and of the relations which legislation, having for its end the welfare of the community as a whole, ought to bear towards production and trade. In so far as international copyrights have not been established, this is the position of the author of to-day. Copyright is defined by Drone in his Law of Copyright, as the exclusive right of the owner to multiply and to dispose of copies of an intellectual production. Copyright may therefore be said to be the legal recognition of brain-work as property. We claim, also, that with reference to the rights of labor, property, and capital, the free-trader is the true protectionist. It is the free-trader who demands for the laborer the fullest, freest use of the results of his labor, and for the capitalist the widest scope in the employment of his capital; and it is he who asserts that the paternal authority which restricts the working man in the free exchange of the products of his craft, which limits the directions and the methods for the use of capital, appropriates or, to speak more strictly, destroys a portion of the value of the labor and the capital, and prevents the ownership from being real or complete.