Mark Twain and his life-long feud with the Copyright Laws of America

'I am the greatest loser alive by the present law'- Charles Dickens

Envisage this, you are a young twenty-something writer in 1850s America, who has recently completed the final draft of your book. You go to a publishing house to get your work printed but they demand that you must sign off your rights to the book to score a deal. None can stand up to these massive corporations because of the near-monopoly they hold on the printing press in the country. To add insult to injury, the law gives you mere twenty-eight years of copyright protection, meaning, by the time you are fifty you won’t make a single dime from the sale of your book. Additionally, according to the recent judgement given in Harriet Beecher Stow V F.W Thomas[1][1], anyone can translate your novel and sell it without your permission or any sort of compensation. Then there is also the problem of English book pirates, who are eagerly waiting to make bootleg copies of your book and sell it without any substantial consequence. In these circumstances would you put your precious time and intellect into writing a book that is predestined to be stolen, copied, translated, and adapted before its inception?

This is the exact puzzle that riddled Samuel Clemens who went on to be known as Mark Twain, throughout his career. Twain believed that he deserved to have a perpetual right over his intellectual property but there had long been concerns regarding books being owned by one person alone. Lord Camden vehemently voiced his rejection of common copyright law in Donaldson v Beckett, “As Knowledge and science are not things to be bound in such cobweb chains.” Although concerns regarding the capitalists setting arbitrary prices for the books and subsequently cutting off the general public from being educated were very valid. Most scholars saw any copyright recognition as a step towards perpetual copyright ownership and in the process failed to consider shorter and more reasonable copyright protection. And so Twain took the onus of waging a war for the want of a more sensible copyright act upon himself.

It all started back in 1865 when Twain became an overnight literary success with his first book, “The Celebrated Jumping Frog Of Calaveras County”. It was a compilation of twenty-seven stories that were previously published in magazines and newspapers. In 1874, Twain wrote to the Librarian of Congress, seeking copyright protection for his book and its cover design. Still, he found that publishers were stealing short funny pieces that he had written for newspapers, putting them into books and selling them. So he brought a suit against them, a first of many. The suit failed because the publisher gave Clemens credit as “Mark Twain.”

Another problem stemmed from his worldwide celebrity. The popularity of his books did not suffice to Americans but extended to the whole of the English-speaking world, especially Canada and the United Kingdom. But the Berne Convention wasn’t signed until 1886, meaning there didn’t yet exist, a uniform international treaty on copyright. Thus, publishers outside America could sell his work without paying royalties to Twain. But more problematically they published cheap editions of Twain’s books in Canada and exported them to the United States. This would make the editions for which Twain was receiving royalties costlier by comparison and the public would resort to buying from the Canadian publishers, effectively rendering Twain unpaid in the process.

So, filling in for the blank spaces the senators left in the copyright laws, he decided to journey to England in 1873, to ensure that the novel he co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner; “The Gilded Age” was published in Britain before it came out in America, two days later. This was done because the British law at the time provided for copyright protection; so long the book was published within the territory of the English empire first. He followed the same procedure during the publication of the iconic “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”.

American copyright law was comparatively less developed, for instance, it only applied to American publications, meaning foreign authors were unable to profit from the publication and sale of their works. To remedy this, Senator Joseph Roswell Hawley introduced a bill in 1885 that would extend copyright protection for foreign authors. Twain vehemently spoke in favour of the bill in the senate and even went as far as to enlist the help of President, Grover Cleveland. The bill ultimately failed in the senate but it showed Twain’s resilience to protect the right of all writers, irrespective of nationality. In 1900 Twain appeared before a committee of Britain’s House of Lords, to testify in favour of copyright protection. This session displayed the House of Lord’s general opinion on ownership over intellectual property. The idea of perpetual ownership over a book was perceived as illogical, and it was argued that there was no such thing as property in ideas and as a book was entirely built from ideas, there could be no property in it. Twain countered this assertion by claiming that there was not a single property that was not derived from an idea.

Society wasn’t prepared to settle for his demand to own his property in perpetuity, so he did. By December 1906, speaking before the Committee on Patents of the Senate and the House, he lobbied for the 42-year copyright period extended “to the author's life and fifty years afterward.” The 1909 Copyright Act did not grant this but extended the period of protection to fifty-six years, which Twain praised before breathing his last the following year. In 1957 during the annual meeting of, the American Bar Association, adopted a special resolution that recognized the efforts of Mark Twain, “who was so greatly responsible for the laws relating to copyrights which have meant so much to all free peoples throughout the world.”

It was finally in 1976 that American copyright laws were amended to accommodate Twain’s ‘author’s life and fifty years. Since the dawn of intellectual property, States have struggled to uphold the rights of the authors and provide them with adequate returns for their work by expanding copyright protection, but simultaneously also prevent monopolies, promote creativity and protect the wider public interests. With the 1976 Revision, the legislators were trying to strike this balance by extending the protection but also providing exceptions to the exclusive rights of owners by broadening the scopes of fair use. With the United States signing the Berne Convention in 1988, the requirement of copyright notice for copyright protection was eliminated reinforcing the inherent possession of copyright by an original literary work.

Thus, Twain’s lifelong struggle which led to his money-hungry portrayal bore fruit sixty-six years after his death. A century that started with skepticism surrounding the idea of an author possessing ownership over a book, gave way to one with substantial improvements in copyright protection and mainstream acceptance of intellectual property as a whole. Today the United States has some of the strongest IP laws in the world. It has extended its copyright protection to the author’s lifetime and seventy years, going twenty years beyond the minimum requirements under the Berne Convention. And Mark Twain’s persistent championing of artists’ rights was instrumental in this achievement.