THE ENGLISH COPYRIGHT COMMISSION. 169 



competent to form the slightest conception about it ? What suggests 

 itself to me is that the matter should be left to the ordinary operations 

 of supply and demand. Why am I to be debarred from making any 

 bargain I please with regai'd to a piece of literary property, otherwise 

 than with regard to any other property ? 



Q. Does not it occur to you that no fixed percentage, let it range 

 as it might, from five up to fifty per cent., could be fairly applicable to 

 all classes of books ? 



A. Am I to understand that the proposition is to make one fixed 

 percentage for all classes of books ? 



Q. As far as we have understood the proposition that is the propo- 

 sition which has been made. 



A. I can hardly conceive that that has been made as a serious 

 proposition by anybody who knows anything about the writing of 

 books ; it is simply astonishing. 



Q. You are aware of the present term of copyright ? 



A. Yes. 



Q. You are aware that the copyright for your works will probably 

 not com.e to an end all at the same period, unless it should happen 

 that you should live for a very long time after the completion of the 

 last ; for instance, that if you were to die say within the next fifteen, 

 twenty, or thirty years, the copj'right of your works would come to a 

 close at various periods, the law being that each should have Avhichever 

 was longest, forty-two years or seven years after life ; and you may 

 probably be aware, to take the instance of one author, that the earliest 

 of Mr. Dickens's copyrights are running out, I believe, in this year, and 

 that the latter of them will run on to, I think, the year 1912. Does it 

 not occur to you that it would be desirable that property of this kind 

 should come to its conclusion all at one and the same time ? 



A. Your question rather involves an opinion upon the propriety of 

 terminating the copyright at all, and I am by no means satisfied that 

 there is any ground for terminating a man's right to his property in 

 books rather than in anything else. 



Q. You are probably aware that the French term is fifty years after 

 death, and the German thirty years after death ? 



A. Yes. 



Q. And that therefore in Germany or in France the copyrights of 

 an author will come to their conclusion at the same time ? 



A. Yes. 



Q. I will ask you whether you do not think that that mode is a 

 better mode than the one which we have adopted. Putting aside the 

 question whether an author's copj'right should be perpetual, and assum- 

 ing that the law will enact as it has enacted, that there shall be a term, 

 w^ould it not appear to you that a term similar to the French or the 

 German term would be better than ours ? 



A. I think so, if you are to have a limit. 



