your power 'of securing to the authors the exclusive right to their respective writings.'"
Henry Clay
report, 1837
The British address was referred to a select committee, whose members were Clay, Webster, Buchanan, Preston and Ewing, which reported favorably a bill for international copyright. The report took high ground in favor of the rights of authors:
"That authors and inventors have, according to the practice among civilized nations, a property in the respective productions of their genius, is incontestable; and that this property should be protected as effectually as any other property is, by law, follows as a legitimate consequence. Authors and inventors are among the greatest benefactors of mankind.…It being established that literary property is entitled to legal protection, it results that this protection ought to be afforded wherever the property is situated.…We should be all shocked if the law tolerated the least invasion of the rights of property, in the case of merchandise, whilst those which justly belong to the works of authors are exposed to daily violation, without the possibility of their invoking the aid of the laws.…In principle, the committee perceive no objection to considering the republic of letters as one great community, and adopting a system of protection for literary property which should be common to all parts of it."
A prophecy
of world
union
The address of British authors and the Clay report called forth a little volume of "Remarks on literary property" by Philip H. Nicklin, a Philadelphia publisher, printed by his own firm of "law booksellers" in 1838, and dedicated to Henry C. Carey, which, though somewhat caustic in its criticisms of some of the arguments put forward by the British authors, heartily favored international copyright. The volume, in fact, contains a glowing prophecy of what
