“Yes, I read the illegal translation,” a Czech internet correspondent known as “Hustey” wrote this summer, when the next, eagerly awaited book in J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series—Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—first appeared in bookstores.
Hustey is one of a growing, worldwide fraternity of internet users who seem to have come to the conclusion that theft is morally defensible, so long as it only involves intellectual property.
“When I saw HP I had to get it straight away because I’ve read all the other books,” a British university student called “Comrade Dave” wrote—as if by way of explanation—about his own theft of Ms. Rowling’s work. “I think it’s unfair to the German fans, just because some people can’t read English and have to read the German book,” opined 16-year-old Britta Sander. One JC, a 36-year-old man from Kansas City, not only admitted his theft but threw in a review: “I thought it was a little slow until the second half, then it got much better”—a bit of chutzpah akin to having someone steal your car, then post a public notice complaining about its pick-up.
Electronic theft has largely revolved around the downloading of popular music through such “file-sharing” devices as Napster. Recently, though, it has expanded to books, thanks mostly to the immense popularity of Ms. Rowling’s series.
“This shows that if authors and publishers choose not to make books available legally, people are going to go out and steal them,” claims Mike Seagroves, director of business development of something called Palm Digital Media, the largest distributor of “e-books.”
In the old days, one usually had to be a member of some organization like the Mafia, before one could go around making barely veiled threats of extortion. But Palm Digital Media apparently feels that Ms. Rowling is asking for too much money to have her e-book distributed legally. And everyone knows that the proper reaction to something being overpriced is to go and steal it.
I’m being facetious, of course, but the dispute over intellectual property rights promises to be a hotly contested issue for years to come. It speaks to the basic divide created by the internet—between the e-world and that of more mundane reality; the virtual and the really real. It is all well and good to talk about a brave, new electronic world, in which music and now literature will be “shared” freely. But what about all those goods and services that remain intrinsically limited by supply? As a writer I, for one, would be happy to have my books distributed for free—so long as I am able to pick up beachfront properties, or nice little tins of Beluga caviar for the same price.
Some will no doubt point out that Ms. Rowling has already made a fortune from previous book sales. True enough. But then Ms. Rowling was a broke, struggling single mother when she invented Harry Potter, thereby creating a commodity that has given joy to millions of children and adults. She has even made it available to many readers for free—at those marvelous institutions known as libraries. By what right, then, should she be deprived of any of the money legally due her?
But this is not the first time that a determined English writer, who had worked his way up from nothing to become the most popular writer in the world, has had to fight to keep publishing pirates from making off with his livelihood. A century-and-a-half ago Charles Dickens faced the same battle—though back then the main culprits were not Czech e-wizards or German teenagers, but Americans.
The love affair between Dickens and America started early. Citizens of New York and Boston swarmed the docksides to get the latest installments of The Old Curiosity Shop, reportedly crying out to ships from England, even before they docked, “Does Little Nell still live?” Dickens, in turn, was enchanted with the idea of American democracy, and would claim, once he got to the United States for the first time, in 1842, that he had “dreamed by day and night, for years, of setting foot upon this shore, and breathing this pure air.”
At first, everything on his initial American tour went splendidly, and Dickens wrote with a certain awe “of the people that line the streets when I go out; of the cheering when I went to the theatre; of the copies of verses, letters of congratulation, welcomes of all kinds, balls, dinners, assemblies without end…” At a spectacular banquet in Boston, he made a graceful speech in which he praised leading American writers “as familiar to our [British] lips as household words.” He went on to express the “hope the time is not far distant when they, in America, will receive of right some substantial profit and return in England from their labours; and when we, in England, shall receive some substantial profit and return in America from ours”—though Dickens assured his audience, “Pray do not misunderstand me…I would rather have the affectionate regard of my fellowmen than I would have heaps and mines of gold.”
The speech was received with what those in attendance described as wild, “tumultuous” applause. Yet the next day’s newspapers were full of articles accusing him of bad taste, and having “created huge dissonance where all else was triumphant unison.” Dickens, it seemed, had touched on an issue close to their mercenary hearts.
In 1842, there was still no international copyright law—a condition that was stunting American letters, and depriving authors on both sides of the Atlantic of a living. Britain had the stronger domestic copyright law, and was willing to recognize the copyright of foreign writers—but only if their countries reciprocated by recognizing the rights of British writers.
This American publishers adamantly refused to do. Instead, American newspapers and magazines competed in bribing English pressmen to get early sheets of British books. They were then rushed over to the U.S. by boat, where the jolly pirates worked their presses around the clock, churning out cheap, “instant” editions in a matter of hours.
But it was not only British authors they were robbing. Few publishers were willing to pay American authors for books, when they could purloin better-known British ones for free. Even so popular a writer as James Fenimore Cooper, had given up writing novels altogether by 1850. Herman Melville was also hurt by the lack of an international copyright, and even such eminent American authors as Emerson, Longfellow, and Nathaniel Hawthorne had to routinely pay publishers an advance in order to have their books produced.. The early giants of American literature had to scramble for work at customs houses and in other government jobs.
“Literature is at a sad discount,” wrote Edgar Allen Poe in the same year as Dickens’s visit. “Without an international copyright law, American authors may as well cut their throats.” According to biographer Sidney P. Moss, Poe had to raise advance money for one collection of poems by collecting 75 cents a head from his former West Point classmates—to whom he then dedicated the book.
Dickens would never be forced into quite such desperate straits—but neither was he so indifferent to “heaps and mines of gold” as he made out in Boston. He had, after all, spent part of a childhood in a debtor’s prison, and as the most popular writer in the world, he pointed out, “of all men living I am the greatest loser.” The jibes of American newspapers only got his back up, and after a speech in Hartford, where he again pressed the issue, Dickens wrote to a friend that “My blood so boiled as I thought of the monstrous injustice that I felt as if I were twelve feet high, when I thrust it down their throats.”
In fact, Dickens’s audiences, and American writers, continued to support him enthusiastically. But the Hartford Times bluntly informed him that, “It happens that we want no advice on the subject and it will be better for Mr. Dickens if he refrains from introducing the subject hereafter…” Dickens biographer Edgar Johnson writes that, “Other newspapers asserted that he was no gentleman, that he was a mercenary scoundrel, that he was abusing the hospitality of the United States by uttering any such criticism of his hosts, that he had malignantly come to the country with that purpose. Anonymous letters echoed these attacks in every key of scurrility.”
Far from being chastised, American book publishers convened in Boston—where they called upon Congress to impose a tariff on foreign books, and made the remarkable claim that to let English writer retain control over their own works would make it impossible “for American editors to alter and adapt them to American taste.”
Even Dickens began to realize that this was a fight he could not win, sarcastically mimicking his hosts in private: “The Americans read him; the free, enlightened, independent Americans; and what more would he have? As to telling them they will have no literature of their own, the universal answer (out of Boston) is, ‘We don’t want one. Why should we pay for one when we can get it for nothing. Our people don’t think of poetry, sir. Dollars, banks, and cotton are our books, sir.’”
The whole fight seemed to jaundice how Dickens viewed the raw young nation, and many Americans were stung by his American Notes, an account of his journey published a few months after his return to England, and by his characterizations of America in the subsequent novel, Martin Chuzzlewit. Newspaper reviews of American Notes castigated him as a “flash reporter” with the sensibility of “a low-bred scullion unexpectedly advanced from the kitchen to the parlour.” James Bennett’s New York Herald pilloried the book as “all leather and prunella,” and its author as “that famous penny-a-liner,” with “the most coarse, vulgar, impudent, and superficial mind…”
This set new standards in gall—as the Herald had been the chief pirate of American Notes. Bennett’s pressmen sold 50,000 copies of the book in two days time—without so much as a dime going to that “famous penny-a-liner.”
Yet time, and Americans’ unquenchable thirst for Dickens’s work, would heal all these wounds. Twenty-five years later he returned to these shores—and was treated to another rapturous reception. By that time, too, Dickens had found a way to reap at least some of the rewards for his work—a series of some seventy-six lectures and readings, which netted him the equivalent of $1.5-$2 million in today’s money from his ecstatic U.S. fans.
Many of his American brethren were not so fortunate. It was not until 1891 that an international copyright law was finally passed, and by then Poe had long since tumbled into alcoholism, and fatal despair, and Herman Melville had largely ceased to write. We can only conjecture as to how many other literary careers were stunted or abandoned altogether, thanks to the shortsighted greed of American publishers.
Surely, in the age of the internet, we can come up with some arrangement that will compensate even writers for their work. For instance, most of the data about the theft of Harry Potter I took from a New York Times article, by Amy Harmon, that I found on-line—and for which I paid $2.95. Fair enough?