172 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



A. No. 



Q. Why, therefore, should you who have given a lecture, or have 

 even written a lecture, if you choose to make it known in any way to 

 other persons, have a right still to get a copyright for it ? 



A. The assumption in that argument, I think, is that the patent law 

 is just : to that I venture to demur, in which case I need not follow 

 out the parallel, 



Q. I am advisedly not putting a question about the justice of it ? 



A. It is obvious that, if I do not admit the justice of a regulation in 

 virtue of which a man who has published a design for a machine cannot 

 obtain a patent for it, the rest of the argument does not affect me. 



Q. Then you would put them all on the same footing ? 



A. Certainly. 



Q. So that, really, to support the whole of your argument, you 

 would be obliged to fall back upon this : that a man has a copyright 

 in his ideas ? 



A. No ; in the form into which he puts them. For example, in the 

 case which you were suggesting to me just now, a man who makes a 

 machine not only has an idea about his machine, but he embodies it in 

 a particular form, with a certain application ; and I think that is one of 

 the great defects of the present patent law, that it has given protection 

 to the idea in applications of which the original inventor never dreamed. 

 I should restrict all protection of that kind to the precise result of a 

 man's intellectual activity, that which is specially his own. 



Q. Before we had a copyright law it was held, as you are probably 

 aware, that if a man had embodied his ideas in the shape of a manu- 

 script, that manuscript before he had handed it to a printer was his 

 property, not merely the paper and the writing, but also all that was 

 in it, that is to say, the form in which it was embodied, and that he 

 could sell it to a publisher ; but now there is an alteration in that : 

 before a man hands his manuscript to a publisher he has a right to the 

 ideas and to the form, but, after he has handed it to a publisher, and it 

 is. published, then in virtue of the statute law he becomes entitled to a 

 property in what you very properly call the form of the book. The 

 result, after all, is that it has simply been adopted as a matter of ex- 

 pediency and of public policy that there should be conferred upon men 

 who write books a certain right of obtaining a profit from them during 

 a certain time. If your contention were correct with regard to the 

 theory of a property in books and ideas, ought not the property to be 

 a lasting one without any definite period ? 



A. Certainly; I have not a doubt of it. 



Q. Then you would urge upon this commission that, when a man 

 had put his ideas into the form of a book, the copyriglit in that book 

 ought to exist forever ? 



A. I think that, as a matter of strict right, it should be so, but as a 

 matter of expediency I do not think it is worth while asking for it ; I 



