In a review of Robert Spoo’s Without Copyrights, Greg Barnhisel describes how early copyright laws led to British dominance in American reading habits:
In the 19th century, the so-called “reprint industry,” which mined previously published books, largely British, dominated American publishing. And while reprinters bore most of the fixed costs facing any publishing concern (labor, materials, advertising, distribution) they had one great competitive advantage: they didn’t have to pay their authors. Until 1891, US law extended copyright protection only to works by American citizens, so these reprinters made a business model out of selling British books, generally without ever contacting (much less entering into an agreement with) their authors. It’s hard to think of a more obvious example of “piracy” than this, and authors from Dickens to Wilde fumed about their vast lost revenue. …
Frustrating as it was to aggrieved British authors, the law had some justification. The US was a large but largely under-booked nation in the early 1800s. In keeping with the spirit of the US Constitution’s Copyright Clause, which emphasizes that the real goal of copyright is not first and foremost the protection of an author’s rights but the promotion “of Science and useful Arts,” the law subsidized the production and dissemination of books. A lot of books. A lot of cheap books that would, Congress hoped, spread across (and educate) our widely dispersed and unschooled nation.
The Dish 