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Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain

Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain

Author: Robert Spoo
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA
ISBN: 9780190469160
Published In: April 2016
Format: Paperback , 368 pages
Jurisdiction: U.S. ? Disclaimer:
Countri(es) stated herein are used as reference only

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Description
Contents
Author

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Provides a thorough historical survey of the impact of U.S. copyright law on transatlantic modernist authors
Documents the growth and development across time of the American public domain, as shaped by the historically protectionist and formalistic U.S. copyright law
Gives fresh insights drawn from unpublished materials-letters by Joyce, John Quinn, Ezra Pound, Sylvia Beach, John M. Price, and others-and makes extensive use of hitherto unknown legal archives

This book tells the story of how the notoriously protectionist American copyright law impacted transatlantic modernism by encouraging the piracy of works published abroad. From its inception in 1790, U.S. copyright law withheld protection from foreign authors, creating an aggressive public domain that claimed works just as soon as they were published abroad. When Congress finally extended protection to foreign works, legal technicalities caused many authors to continue to lose their copyrights.

The American public domain made vast numbers of foreign works freely available to American publishers. In order to avert ruinous competition for these unprotected resources, publishers evolved <"trade courtesy,>" whereby the first house to announce plans to issue a foreign work acquired informal rights in the work-a kind of makeshift copyright grounded on unwritten norms and elaborate professional etiquette. Courtesy was a form of order without law that safeguarded publishers' interests, punished deviants from the code, and remunerated foreign authors for the exploitation of their works.

Drawing on previously undiscovered archives, this book reveals the convergence of law, piracy, and courtesy in the dissemination of transatlantic modernism in the United States. The chief actors are James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and the New York pirate-pornographer Samuel Roth, with their very different attitudes toward intellectual property. Joyce's growing reputation in America, Pound's proposals for copyright reform, Roth's activities as purveyor of a hybrid modernism compounded of verbal experiment and entertainment for men-these and other developments cannot be understood apart from the contemporaneous American law and the voracious public domain it created.

The book also tells the untold legal stories behind key events of modernism. When Roth reprinted the uncopyrighted Ulysses without permission, Joyce retaliated by drawing upon the punitive dimension of trade courtesy and by filing a lawsuit seeking damages for Roth's exploitation of his valuable name. Later, the courtesy tradition enabled Joyce to enjoy informal protection for Ulysses after Random House published the authorized American edition in 1934. Publishing norms, not copyright, kept pirates from Ulysses.

Readership: Academics interested in intellectual property, copyright, and figures like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Roth.

Introduction
Chapter 1: "The American Public Domain and the Courtesy of the Trade in the Nineteenth Century"
Chapter 2: "Transatlantic Modernism and the American Public Domain."
Chapter 3: "Ezra Pound's Copyright Statute: Perpetual Rights and Unfair Competition with the Dead."
Chapter 4: "James Joyce's Ulysses and American Copyright Protectionism."
Chapter 5: "James Joyce v. Samuel Roth and Two Worlds Publishing Company."
Chapter 6: "The 1934 Random House Ulysses: Copyright and Trade Courtesy.
Epilogue

Robert Spoo is Professor of Law at the University of Tulsa. A former editor of James Joyce Quarterly, he is the author of James Joyce and the Language of History (Oxford UP, 1994; net sales: 880).