Harper Brothers (Harper Collins Publishing) = Pirates
I was reading a book today about the history of cities and one of the little tidbits I really enjoyed was that the Harper Brothers and many other publishers pirated books to sell locally. Which is funny considering their positions now.
Like many publishers of the 1800s, Harper Bros. took advantage of the lack of international copyright enforcement. The firm printed pirated copies of works by such British authors as Charles Dickens, William Make-peace Thackeray, and Anne, Charlotte, and Emily Brontë. Harper Bros.’ best-selling pirated work by a British author was Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England from the Accession of James II. The book sold approximately 400,000 copies, a figure that would classify it as a nonfiction bestseller at the turn of the twentieth century. Because international copyright laws were not enforced, U.S. publishers did not pay royalties to either the British authors or their publishers. The American market had grown to be so significant that, in 1842, Dickens traveled to the United States in an effort to secure royalties from the sale of his works. He was unsuccessful at recouping this money, but the trip did give Dickens the material for his book American Notes for General Circulation, which Harper Bros. promptly pirated.
Read more info here on this and other in the early publishing industries.
Just makes you realize that once you are in power the way you got that power quickly becomes “illegal”. You see the same thing with online startups, they abuse all kinds of spam rules, or what they do with information and once they have grown they rewrite history to pretend they didn’t do x.
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