Copyright: Its History and Its Law — Context and Discussion

Legislative Play-by-Play

The excerpts devote unusual attention to the procedural drama of the 1891 International Copyright Act. Bowker records not just the bill's passage but the exact sequence of votes—36 to 14 in the Senate, 128 to 64 in the House—and the all-night session that ended at half past two in the morning on March 4, 1891. He names senators who championed or opposed specific amendments, such as Sherman's amendment on importation of authorized foreign editions and Frye's attempt to extend the manufacturing clause beyond books to include maps, charts, and photographs.

This granular detail suggests Bowker valued the legislative process as much as the resulting law. He treats the act's passage as a climax after a contest that 'began more than half a century before,' emphasizing the dramatic, contingent nature of legal change.

Trade Practices Before the Law

Bowker devotes significant space to the 'courtesy of the trade,' an informal system by which American publishers voluntarily paid foreign authors—sometimes the same ten percent royalty as to domestic authors—without legal obligation. He cites a specific case of $5,000 for 'advance sheets' of an English work. This practice, he notes, allowed American and English works to compete 'on much the same terms' until the rise of cheap quarto libraries in 1876.

These libraries reprinted entire novels for ten to twenty cents, exploiting low postal rates for periodicals. Bowker's description of their output—'one library at one time issuing a book daily, others weekly'—grounds the abstract concept of market disruption in concrete business history. The excerpts show him treating trade custom as a de facto regulatory system that preceded statutory law.

The International Frame

Bowker situates American developments within a global movement. He notes that by 1912, Portugal had joined the Berlin convention, Russia and Holland were shaping domestic legislation, and China had decreed copyright protection in 1910. The Buenos Aires convention of 1910, ratified by the United States, created a new basis for protection across the Pan American Union.

His forward-looking conclusion quotes the 1838 American dream of 'a universal republic of letters whose foundation shall be one just law,' suggesting that international copyright was not merely a legal technicality but a cultural aspiration. The excerpts do not reveal whether Bowker believed this dream was fully realized, but they show him measuring progress by concrete diplomatic and legislative milestones.

Bowker's treatise rewards readers who attend to its procedural details and trade anecdotes. The excerpts suggest that the book's value lies less in abstract principles than in its documentation of how copyright law was actually made—through late-night votes, industry customs, and international negotiations. Readers interested in the political economy of authorship will find a rich, if partisan, contemporary account.

Bowker’s careful ledger of trade customs made me think of my grandfather, who annotated his law books in the margins like prayers. The way these statutes tried to knit together a universal republic of letters reminded me of a similar quiet ache I felt reading The Acts of Uniformity: Their Scope and Effect — Themes and Context — that longing for coherence in human things, always slightly out of reach.