The law and practice of to-day give the meat that remains on the bones of the dead author after the expiration of the statutory period of protection to the Trade. Any publisher who likes to bring out an edition can do so, though by doing so he does not gain any exclusive rights. A brother publisher may compete with him. As a result the public is usually well served with cheap editions of those non-copyright authors whose works are worth reprinting the moment the copyright expires.
Some lovers of justice, however, think that it is unnecessary all at once to endow the Trade with these windfalls, and that if an author's family, or his or their assignees, were prepared to publish cheap editions immediately after the expiration of the usual period of protection, they ought to be allowed to do so for a further period of, say, forty years. If they failed within a reasonable time either to do so themselves or to arrange for others to do so, this extended period should lapse.
Were this to be the law nobody could say that it was unfair; but it is never likely to be the law. It would take time for discussion, and now there is no time left in which to discuss anything in Parliament. A much-needed Copyright Bill has been in draft for years, has been mentioned in Queen's and King's speeches, but it has never been read even a first time. If it ever is read a first time, its only chance of becoming law will be if it is taken in a lump, as it stands, without consideration or amendment. To such a pass has legislation been reduced in this country!
This draft Bill does not contain any provision for specially protecting the families of authors whose works long outlive their mortal lives. It makes no invidious distinctions. It leaves all the authors to hang together, the quick and the dead. Perhaps this is the better way.
I have been told by more than one correspondent, and not always in words of urbanity, that I owe an apology to the manes of Miss Hannah More, whose works I once purchased in nineteen volumes for 8s. 6d., and about whom in consequence I wrote a page some ten years ago.[A]
[Footnote A: See _Collected Essays_, ii. 255.]
To be accused of rudeness to a lady who exchanged witticisms with Dr. Johnson, soothed the widowed heart of Mrs. Garrick, directed the early studies of Macaulay, and in the spring of 1815 presented a small copy of her _Sacred Dramas_ to Mr. Gladstone, is no light matter. To libel the dead is, I know, not actionable--indeed, it is impossible; but evil-speaking, lying, and slandering are canonical offences from which the obligation to refrain knows no limits of time or place.