Without copyrights : piracy, publishing, and the public domain / Robert Spoo.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 327-335) and index.

Prologue: Growing the American public domain -- The American public domain and the courtesy of the trade in the nineteenth century -- Transatlantic modernism in the American public domain -- Ezra Pound's copyright statute: Perpetual rights and unfair competition with the dead -- Ulysses unauthorized: Protectionism, piracy, and protest -- Joyce V. Roth: Authors' names and Blue Valley Butter -- Ulysses authorized: Random House and courtesy -- Epilogue: Disturbing the American public domain.

Without Copyrights tells the story of how the clashes between authors, publishers, and literary "pirates" influenced both American copyright law and literature itself. From its inception in 1790, American copyright law offered no or less-than-perfect protection for works published abroad-to the fury of Charles Dickens, among others, who sometimes received no money from vast sales in the United States. American publishers avoided ruinous competition with each other through "courtesy of the trade," a code of etiquette that gave informal, exclusive rights to the first house to announce plans to issue an uncopyrighted foreign work. The climate of trade courtesy, lawful piracy, and the burdensome rules of American copyright law profoundly affected transatlantic writers in the twentieth century. Drawing on previously unknown legal archives, Robert Spoo recounts efforts by James Joyce, Ezra Pound, Bennett Cerf, the founder of Random House, and others to crush piracy, reform U.S. copyright law, and define the public domain.