Document Type

Hearing

Publication Date

12-11-1906

Abstract

Text of S. 6330 and H.R. 19853

Page 116-7

STATEMENT OF MR. SAMUEL L. CLEMENS:

Necessarily I am interested particularly and especially in the part of the bill which concerns my trade. I like that bill, and I like that extension from the present limit of copyright life of forty-two years to the author's life and fifty years after. I think that will satisfy any reasonable author, because it will take care of his children. … I should like to have you encourage oyster culture and anything else. I have no illiberal feeling toward the bill. I like it. I think it is just. I think it is righteous, and I hope it will pass without reduction or amendment of any kind.

I understand, I am aware, that copyright must have a term, must have a limit, because that is required by the Constitution of the United States, which sets aside the earlier constitution, ·which we call the Decalogue. The Decalogue says that you shall not take away from any man his property. … I do not know why there should be a limit at all. I am quite unable to guess why there should be a limit to the possession of the product of a man's labor. There is no limit to real estate. …

The excuse for a limited copyright in the United States is that an author who has produced a book and has had the benefit of it for that term has had the profit of it long enough, and therefore the Government takes the property, which does not belong to it, and generously gives it to the eighty-eight millions. That is the idea. If it did that, that would be one thing. But it does not do anything of the kind. It merely takes the author's property, merely takes from his children the bread and profit of that book, and gives the publisher double profit. The publisher and some of his confederates who are in the conspiracy rear families in affluence, and they continue the enjoyment of these ill-gotten gains generation after generation They live forever, the publishers do. …

Comments

Part J

S. 6330 AND H. R. 19853

TO AMEND AND CONSOLIDATE THE ACTS
RESPECTING COPYRIGHT.

DECEMBER 7, 8, 10. AND 11, 1906.

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