Tom Bell on a World Without Copyrights

What would happen if
authors and publishers could not count on copyright to protect them
from piracy? History hints at the answer, Tom Bell writes. From the
founding of the United States until well into the 20th century,
domestic copyright laws generally denied foreign authors any form
of legal redress. Yet as the legal scholar Robert Spoo explains
in Without Copyrights, they developed other
stratagems to recoup the costs of writing, producing, and marketing
their works.

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