distinction between the
products of the brain, when put in the concrete form of books and
multiplied by the art of printing, and the land or other property which
is held by common law tenure. Society views the absolute or exclusive
property in books or inventions as a monopoly. While a monopoly may be
justified for a reasonable number of years, on the obvious ground of
securing to their originators the pecuniary benefit of their own ideas, a
perpetual monopoly is generally regarded as odious and unjust. Hence
society says to the author or inventor: "Put your ideas into material
form, and we will guarantee you the exclusive right to multiply and sell
your books or your inventions for a term long enough to secure a fair
reward to you and to your family; after that period we want your
monopoly, with its individual benefits, to cease in favor of the greatest
good of all." If this appears unfair to authors, who contribute so
greatly to the instruction and the advancement of mankind, it is to be
considered that a perpetual copyright would (1) largely increase the cost
of books, which should be most widely diffused for the public benefit,
prolonging the enhanced cost indefinitely beyond the author's lifetime;
(2) it would benefit by a special privilege, prolonged without limit, a
class of book manufacturers or publishers who act as middle-men between
the author and the public, and who own, in most cases, the entire
property in the works of authors deceased, and which they did not
originate; (3) it would amount in a few centuries to so vast a sum, taxed
upon the community who buy books, that the publishers of Shakespeare's
works, for example, who under perpetual copyright could alone print the
poet's writings, might have reaped colossal fortunes, perhaps unequalled
by any private wealth yet amassed in the world.

If it is said that copyright, thus limited, is a purely arbitrary right,
it may be answered that all legal provisions are arbitrary. That which is
an absolute or natural right, so long as held in idea or in manuscript,
becomes, when given to the world in multiplied copies, the creature of
law. The most that authors can fairly claim is a sufficiently prolonged
exclusive right to guarantee them for a lifetime the just reward of their
labors, with a reversion for their immediate heirs. That such exclusive
rights should run to their remotest posterity, or, _a fortiori_, to mere
merchants or artificers who had no hand whatev