Robert Spoo - Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain

WITHOUT COPYRIGHTS

MODERNIST LITERATURE & CULTURE

Kevin J. H. Dettmar & Mark Wollaeger, Series Editors

Consuming Traditions
Elizabeth Outka

Machine Age Comedy
Michael North

The Art of Scandal
Sean Latham

The Hypothetical Mandarin
Eric Hayot

Nations of Nothing But Poetry
Matthew Hart

Modernism & Copyright
Paul K. Saint-Amour

Accented America
Joshua L. Miller

Criminal Ingenuity
Ellen Levy

Modernisms Mythic Pose
Carrie J. Preston

Pragmatic Modernism
Lisa Schoenbach

Unseasonable Youth
Jed Esty

World Views
Jon Hegglund

Americanizing Britain
Genevieve Abravanel

Modernism and the New Spain
Gayle Rogers

At the Violet Hour
Sarah Cole

The Great American Songbooks
T. Austin Graham

Fictions of Autonomy
Andrew Goldstone

Without Copyrights
Robert Spoo

The Degenerate Muse
Robin G. Schulze

Commonwealth of Letters
Peter J. Kalliney

PIRACY, PUBLISHING, AND THE PUBLIC DOMAIN

ROBERT SPOO

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Robert Spoo 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spoo, Robert E.

Without copyrights : piracy, publishing, and the public domain / Robert Spoo.

p. cm. (Modernist literature & culture)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 9780199927876 ISBN 9780199927883 1. CopyrightUnited StatesHistory.

2. Copyright, InternationalHistory. 3. Law and literature. I. Title.

KF2994.S65 2013

346.730482dc23

2012040019

1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper

For the Three Tolerant Graces: Marjorie, Sophie, and Virginia

THE AMERICAN PUBLIC DOMAIN AND THE COURTESY OF THE TRADE IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

TRANSATLANTIC MODERNISM IN THE AMERICAN PUBLIC DOMAIN

EZRA POUNDS COPYRIGHT STATUTE: PERPETUAL RIGHTS AND UNFAIR COMPETITION WITH THE DEAD

ULYSSES UNAUTHORIZED: PROTECTIONISM, PIRACY, AND PROTEST

JOYCE V. ROTH: AUTHORS NAMES AND BLUE VALLEY BUTTER

ULYSSES AUTHORIZED: RANDOM HOUSE AND COURTESY

In publishing Paul Saint-Amours edited collection Modernism and Copyright in 2011 (which includes an early version of of this book), we hoped to set the stage for a more thorough and sophisticated conversation about the role intellectual property issues played in the construction of modernism. Further, we believed that the Modernist Literature & Culture series might be an attractive venue for the kind of vibrant work on IP modernism sketched out in that volume. (Indeed, the series had already tapped into new work in law and modern literature with Sean Lathams The Art of Scandal in 2009.) In the back of our minds, we also knew that Robert Spoo was at work on an important study of the topic, work that reached back into the nineteenth-century tradition of trade courtesy and bore the impress of his careful legal scholarship; for many of us, the earliest inkling of this work came with the 1998 publication of his Yale Law Journal article Copyright Protectionism and Its Discontents: The Case of James Joyces Ulysses in America.

But we think its fair to say that no onenot even Bobknew back then how this story would turn out. In Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain, Spoo traces the shifting and dynamic relationship between intellectual property law, informal gentlemens publishing traditions, and the practices of modernist literary productionthe story, as he describes it, of transatlantic modernisms encounter with U.S. copyright law, lawful piracy, and the American public domain. The books thesis, to pick up on just one of Spoos artful formulations, is that the fear of failed copyrights lay behind many developments of modernism.

Its hard to write this foreword without dropping a lot of spoilers: youll learn things that will fundamentally unsettle your understanding of modernist authorship. Without giving too much away here, one comes away from Without Copyrights with a profound (and completely unexpected) respect for the poster boy of modernist literary piracy, Samuel Rothand with a much complicated understanding of the legality of the piracy of Roth and others, a piracy enabled, if not created, by protectionist American copyright law. Ezra Pounds thoughtful and systematic response to the predations of a publisher like Roth resulted in his somewhat quixotic proposal for perpetual copyrights combined with requirements to keep works in print, a proposal that begins to make sense for the first time in Spoos account; as he writes, Pound was the theorist of modernisms encounter with copyright and piracy.

As was demonstrated rather dramatically by the internet leak in 2003 of Radioheads album Hail to the Thief ten weeks prior to its commercial release, piracy can in fact generate publicity, and have a beneficial, not parasitic, effect on sales: the album sold 300,000 copies in its first week of U.S. release, a debut aided, according to many commentators, by the bootlegged preview. (See, for instance, Jonathan Cohen, Web Leak Fails to Deter Capitols Radiohead Setup, Billboard 14 June 2003.) But similar parables date back to at least the late nineteenth century; Spoo tells of the U.S. lecture tours of Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats, for instance, both of whom benefitted commercially from being pirated.

Finally (for now), its impossible to read through this careful and even-handed work without having ones conception of Joyce significantly complicated. We wont ruin the suspense, but suffice it to say that while he was shocked, shocked! by Roths piracy, Joyce was hardly a naf when it came to the hard realities of the U.S.s refusal to sign on to international copyright accords. Pirate, as Spoo succinctly puts it, was a term that could expand and contract with the nature of the perceived outrage.