The recent editorial controversy on copyright in Liberty is timely and most interesting. For fine argument and literary grace Mr. Yarros’s presentation of the plausible view he represents has never, I think, been excelled. But, while Mr. Tucker’s language is less clear and persuasive, his more penetrative logic is seen, when comprehended, to have smitten through the beautiful armor of his antagonist with deadly effect. Some time ago I sent an article to Mr. Pentecost, criticising some of his printed views. So far as I know, he has not considered it expedient to print it, and I propose to include most of its arguments, in a somewhat modified form, in the present article.

It appears to me indisputable that, if copyright or patent-right (they are the same in essence) exist at all as property, they must resemble all other forms of property, must conform to the definitions of true property. If my hands make a hoe from wood and iron, it is admitted that the hoe is rightfully my property, and the property of my heirs and assigns forever. Only by free gift, or equitable exchange, can it be rightfully separated from me. I can (and let this be carefully observed) use this hoe in any way I please, even if I please to use it for fuel, and I can rightfully withhold it from use. The right of property then includes the right of gift (of which bequest is but a form); of sale; of destruction (or change of form); of disuse; and these without other than natural limits. If, then, an author or inventor possesses such property in his works as to be rightfully able to forbid all other men copying them, this property of his possesses all these attributes. It is his property and that of his heirs and assigns forever; it is a natural right, not to be increased by courts or legislators, or limited by them.

The owner has a right to give away his copyright, to sell it, to destroy it, to withhold it from use. (The impossibility of destroying an idea, or withholding it from use, it may be remarked in passing, is excellent proof that there can be no property in ideas.)

But distinguishing between the idea and its expression, Mr. Yarros and Mr. George renounce copyright property in the former, and assert it only in the latter. Any one may copy the idea,—that is free; but the way in which some one, for the first time, expresses that idea,—that is his property, and no one may copy it without invasion. This amounts in practice to copyright in forms, to an assertion that all original forms are the originator’s exclusive property. Therefore, if I express the idea of the hoe in some new form, I have perpetual property in that form.

Is this distinction a true one? Mr. Tucker denies that it is, and with wonderful acuteness declares that the form of expression is itself an idea, therefore self-condemned as property by the attempted distinction. If we accept this view, it follows that the hoe I make is mine, but the form in which I make it, no matter how original, being an idea, is not mine; and my neighbor, seeing my hoe, can rightfully make another like it, which, being his production, is his. It appears to me that Mr. Tucker’s position is impregnable, and it might be argued in support of it that all ideas exist in consciousness as forms merely. A formless idea is inconceivable, cannot in any way be apprehended by human thought. Nothing can for an instant be entertained by the mind that does not present itself in some form, actual or symbolic. Therefore in what is called discovering an idea I discover a form, and to me the idea and its form are one, and in expressing the idea I must express that form, or else feel that I have expressed the idea incompletely.

So, practically, it is all one whether we copyright an idea or patent a form. This leads to the question that has from the first been pressing upon us: What practical advantage has the patenting an individual’s form of expressing an idea over patenting the idea itself in his favor?—and to the inevitable answer: No advantage; they are one and the same.

To leave out governmental patenting, and assert that a man has a natural right to prevent others from copying his inventions, only increases the evil, and therefore proves it, for evils are best proven by carrying them out to their natural or logical conclusion. Government patent right is limited, and therefore, if evil, is limited evil; but natural patent right, if it exist at all as a true form of property, must be perpetual, and therefore, if evil, is limitless evil, and such indeed it would prove.

It is quite within the limits of possibility, however improbable, that I could invent a hoe so superior to any other that not only all existing hoes, but all existing tools of cultivation, were worthless by comparison.

The practice of improved agriculture would then depend upon the manufacture and use of my hoes, yet the form of hoe thus expressed being exclusively mine, I would at once become an autocrat of tremendous power. Not only could I, and my heirs and assigns, obtain untold wealth by exacting tribute from all needers of my hoes, the entire agricultural population, and thus imperil human liberty without hope of redress, but we could at any time do something perhaps even worse,—refuse to make these hoes altogether, and forbid others to do so, and this for all time. If copyright (the right to prevent copying) is a natural property right, we could do this as innocently as a gardener can hang up his hoe in his tool-house, and refuse to use it, or lend it. Suppose the author of Shakspere, from some insane whim, forever forbidding others to copy his plays. Suppose Spencer stopping all publication of his works.

Either we must admit all this, or we must deny the right of use and abuse as a correct definition of property, and assert that all honest property is usufruct merely, a possessory right, the same for labor products as for air, light, water, land, etc.; an assertion that a man has a right to own no more than he needs of anything.

There is no escape here, however, for usufruct is a good rule that works both ways, and, in denying a man’s right to own what he does not need, assumes his right to own what he does need. Now a man does not need perpetual copyright in that which he has invented, while other men do greatly need perfect freedom in copying it; therefore usufruct denies property in original forms, and brings us back to universal liberty of copying.

We are obliged to reach this conclusion, no matter from what direction we approach the subject.

Is it asserted that original discovery gives exclusive right to copy? Consider the nature of mental action. You cannot cut an idea bodily out of a brain and transplant it into another brain as you might transplant a strawberry from one garden to another. If I think the same thought as my neighbor, very well; it is plain that I have taken and received nothing from him, for he still has his thought as strong as ever. Every thought that I have is my own, and without my mental action could by no possibility have been implanted in me. Mental action appears to be the response, or reaction, of the brain to the impressions of the environment. Therefore a man is not a god, self-originating ideas. The facts of my environment, of which my neighbor’s thoughts and acts are a part, impress my brain to react in the production of certain ideas. If I utter these ideas in words or acts, they become a part of my neighbors’ environment, impressing their brains to react in their reproduction; their brains having the same natural right to react to impressions as mine. To interfere in any way with this process is to prevent that universal mental liberty for which true liberals are supposed to contend.

My understanding of my environment is my idea of it. That which I see in the physical as well as the mental realm is equally ideal,—a state of consciousness. Everything that I understand I discover, just as much as the first man who understood it and discovered it. If a revelation to John the Baptist was no revelation to Thomas Paine, neither is another’s discovery any discovery for me, though perhaps making discovery easier for me. (Even governments do not refuse or award patent rights with any reference to ease or difficulty of discovery, but simply with reference to priority of application.) I must discover it for myself. My understanding of another’s idea, as before shown, is not his idea, but my own, and my discovery of his discovery is original discovery so far as I am concerned, no matter how many thousand times discovered by others before. So, if original discovery gives exclusive right to copy, very well, all discovery is original; all understanding is original discovery for the individual making it, and beyond the individual we, as egoistic Anarchists, have no need to go. In nature first thought, or first perception, or first discovery, receives no more reward and gives no more exclusive right than second thought, or third perception, or fifth, or any other discovery. Besides, priority in time has nothing to do with it in nature, for each individual is rewarded for his own intelligence; nor in law, for the modern inventor of a non-breakable glass would not be refused a patent because malleable glass was one of the lost arts of the ancients; nor in public opinion, for we honor Swartz none the less for inventing gunpowder because Roger Bacon anticipated him, or because the Chinese had it centuries before.

All individual action is original, and yet who knows how many of us ever thought a thought unthought before, [7] or did a deed never before done? The question, what is new under the sun? may be answered equally well by saying everything, or nothing. So then, if original discovery is essential to copyright, all men have copyright, because all men attain their ideas by an independent process of discovery. If there is any justice or force in the doctrine that originality conveys natural monopoly in copyright, it must logically apply to all ideas, or means of expressing them. So if it be maintained that nothing is original except with the first man who discovered it, it follows that, if justice were done, we should have to pay royalty for almost every thought and deed to the heirs of these first thinkers and doers,—an intolerable nuisance and slavery. But even this would end in equality, for every man’s ancestors would be the first to have thought and done many things, and the only way to avoid incessant litigation of unprovable claims would be for each man to say to his fellows: Give me your copyright, and I will give you mine. Therefore, whether we say originality is with each independent discoverer or with the first discoverer, we end alike in equal and universal copyright. Or, if we decide that there is nothing original, everything being derived from something else; or, if we decide that the originator, while perhaps existing, or having existed, cannot be discovered, we reach the same conclusion.

Do I, then, deny copyright? Yes and no. I deny false, legal copyright, which is the privilege of the first man who exercises his faculties in discovery or production to forbid others to imitate without permission. This is really not copyright, but the invasion of true copyright, which is the inalienable right of every man to copy whatever he pleases if he can, a part of that complete natural liberty of the inoffensive for which we Anarchists persistently stand. That there is no offence in copying is proved by the simple fact that, even if I think a thought similar to the thought of my fellow, he is not thereby at all prevented from thinking it; if he copies my hoe, he does not by so doing take away my hoe, or prevent my using it, or making as many as I please like it. This consideration alone is all-sufficient to make true Anarchists endorse free copyright, inasmuch as all action not invasive is truly free and justifiable.

Legal copyright, patent-right, is only one form of that hydra headed monopoly which is reducing us all to slavery. This is the true copyright, my right and your right to copy and reproduce everything our senses comprehend; anything less than this stops human growth and blocks the wheels of progress. If I am free to copy all men’s thoughts and deeds, I am a man among men; if I may do freely only that which I am first to do, I am a pauper or a slave.

But if we refuse monopolistic copyright, how shall the author be compensated? We might justly refuse this question by saying that at this stage of social evolution we are concerned only with laying the ethical foundations of that future free society in which human happiness will be assured, and by confidently asserting that, if literary works are essential to the happiness of men in a free society, free Socialists will find little difficulty in discovering ways and means to justly compensate and encourage authors without permitting them to invade or be invaded. But perhaps it would be better to mention a few ways in which this result might be attained.

First, for the straightforward ordinary way,—the matter-of-course business way. In a society founded altogether upon principles of liberty and honesty,—and we are contemplating none other,—it is manifest that no respectable printer would think of printing a manuscript without justly compensating the author for his labor. It is manifest that no honest buyer would purchase other than this authorized edition, until the publisher had in his turn sold enough of these books at a given price to compensate him for the sum paid the author. This might be accomplished by adding the purchase price to the cost of the first edition, distributed equally among the number of volumes; the printing of a second edition proving to all the world that the publisher and author had been paid, and that all publishers might now copy as much as they pleased without unfairness. It seems to me reasonable that this, or something very like it, would occur in the natural order of events within free conditions. It were of course too much to suppose that there would be no unscrupulous publishers or unscrupulous readers; but it would also be too much to suppose that, in a state of society honest and intelligent enough to adopt Anarchy, these would be sufficient in number to sufficiently affect the practicability of the above arrangement.

A modification of the above would be for the author to publish his own book at his own expense, adding the cost of writing the work to the printing cost of the first edition, being in other respects like the first plan. If the author valued his work too highly, and charged too much per copy, purchasers would be few; and, in order to sell, he would be obliged to reduce price, or sell out cheaply to some publisher. Therefore, supply and demand would ensure fair price, approximately.

The fame which excellent work brings is one of the natural compensations which most literary men value immeasurably higher than any pecuniary reward, and this compensation free copyright only increases; the more freely and abundantly an author’s books are copied, the greater the knowledge of him and his fame. Besides these ordinary and natural compensations, there might be added such extra inducements to literary effort as literary societies (and they would naturally be numerous and generous in a free society) might devise,—the offer of prizes, medals, etc., or perhaps an agreement by each member to purchase a copy of any work endorsed by a chosen literary committee; or other methods.

In brief, where there is a will there is a way, and we have very little trust in liberty, and very little faith in human ingenuity, if we doubt that it will be perfectly practicable to justly compensate every worker, without permitting him to become a monopolizer and a menace.

J. Wm. Lloyd