Prologue to Without Copyrights

Résumé du livre

This Prologue introduces Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), an interdisciplinary and historical study of the American public domain -- a vast and unique literary commons assembled from the legal have-nots of foreign authorship and reflecting the isolationist policies of a developing nation in quest of instant and assured culture. The American public domain was nothing less than an aggressively legislated commons, an invitation to “piracy” that served the interests of the printing trade, book manufacturers, and an increasingly literate populace. For the first century of federal copyright protection and well into the twentieth century, the American public domain grew substantially through the influx of new works by foreign-domiciled authors. By operation of the copyright law, these works were claimed, almost as soon as they were issued abroad, by a preternaturally premature, or forced, commons. Only the countervailing practice of trade courtesy -- an informal, norms-based practice voluntarily engaged in by American publishers -- restored a precarious order to the publishing scene by imitating the main features of copyright law and permitting both publishers and authors to benefit, though inconsistently, from the wholly informal exclusive rights that trade courtesy recognized. The Prologue goes on to preview the book's exploration of the same forces -- copyright law, legalized piracy, and trade courtesy -- as they shaped the production and consumption of transatlantic modernism in the United States in the twentieth century. After examining the poet Ezra Pound's carefully elaborated proposals for American copyright reform and his studiously ambivalent attitudes towards authors' legal rights and disseminative piracy, the book settles into a sustained exploration of the impact of U.S. copyright law on James Joyce's Ulysses, tracing the loss of that work's American copyright, the unauthorized but legal depredations of Samuel Roth, the international protest launched by Joyce and his supporters against Roth, and the lawsuit that Joyce waged against Roth in the New York courts in 1927-28. The concluding chapter of the book examines the efforts by Joyce, the publisher Bennett Cerf, and the attorney Morris L. Ernst to free Ulysses from the obscenity strictures that prevented its issuance by a legitimate American publisher. My perspective, however, is not the familiar one of focusing on the legal strategies and arguments that persuaded Judge John M. Woolsey to declare Joyce's masterpiece to be safe for admission to the United States. Rather, I tell the much less familiar story of how the uncopyrighted status of Ulysses in America created new legal obstacles for Random House, and how Cerf and Joyce shrewdly resurrected and repurposed the nineteenth-century practice of trade courtesy to fend off what both had feared would be a feeding frenzy of lawful piracy following Judge Woolsey's removal of the last legal barrier -- obscenity law -- to the free dissemination of what was widely believed to be a public-domain text.