As current battles rage over author's rights and royalties on the ebook front, it is useful to recall that fights for authors' rights have a very long history. In fact, such rights were only codified internationally within the past century or so (at the 1886 Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works).
Although printing privileges were a source of contention as early as the 15th century, it was not until the following century that authors' rights began to be asserted. Even so, it would be another century before regulations would start to be promulgated that were more concerned with protection of personal rights than with protection of state interests (i.e., censorship).
Great Britain introduced the first modern copyright statute in 1710 (the Statute of Anne). Though this statute was weighted heavily in favor of printers, not authors, it did mark, as Scott Bennett observes in a recent article, the beginning of a "public domain for intellectual property."
Over the next two centuries, numerous battles would be fought over the respective interests of authors, publishers & printers, and the public. As Bennett remarks,
[t]he interests of authors were often piously advanced in the eighteenth century debates about copyright, but in fact those interests counted for little. Not the legal, but the commercial position of authors began to change only in the nineteenth century with mass produced paper, mechanically powered printing, fast-widening literacy, and the professionalization of writing. While authors remained dependent on those who managed printing and publication, the democratized market for reading gave authors a significant economic role unlike any they had had before.
And thereby hangs a tale....
So long as literacy was not widespread, the publication of most literary works produced very little income for either printers/publishers (the roles were combined in earlier centuries) or authors. As literacy became more widespread, the money that could be realized from the publication of literary works became quite a bit more substantial. Popular authors like Sir Walter Scott could sell thousands of volumes.
It's one thing for printers, publishers and authors to lose money on a few hundred titles. It's quite another to lose money on thousands of titles. Literary piracy, which had been a problem virtually since the advent of printing in western Europe, was almost standard practice in some countries by the 19th century. Popular authors (e.g., Dickens and Twain) were constantly losing money to pirates. Pirate publishers consistently realized far greater profits than authorized publishers, largely because pirates didn't pay authors any royalties. (All of which had a not inconsiderable impact on the development of literary canons, as William St. Clair makes clear in his The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period.)
In response to this continuing piracy, authors and their authorized publishers created the Author's Edition. This edition of an author's work, so asserted the author and his authorized publisher, was morally superior to all other editions of an author's work because the author was compensated for his literary efforts. Take that, ye scurvy pirates!
In the 1852 Author's Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, for example, the publisher notes that The Publisher thinks it right to state, that the Authoress of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” has a direct interest in the sale of this Edition; and he trusts that this fact, together with the superior typography of the volume, and the lowness of the price, will be considered as giving it a higher claim to general patronage than is possessed by any other Edition published in this country.
Such editions became more prevalent as the 19th century progressed:
Ultimately, these editions did little to stem the tide of literary piracy. What they did do, however, was help insure that modern copyright laws assert authors' rights in both economic and moral terms....
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