"The value of any literary work depends upon the form which it gives to those ideas which belong to the common stock of truth. This form is the result of toil, toil which is more arduous and exhausting, toil which requires more patience and self-denial, toil which costs a larger outlay of time and money to prepare for it, and a greater wear
and tear of vital tissue to execute it, than perhaps any other kind of labor. The disembodied ideas are no man's property; but the embodied ideas, which have been brought into shape and order by the lonely worker in the sweat of his brain, are his own....
When a thief gets into your library, the probabilities are that he will not carry off Hodge's Theology or Jay's Morning Exercises. He will seek diligently for something more to his liking.
Nine-tenths of the books that are stolen are novels, and nine-tenths of those are novels of a doubtful character. It is no advantage to what is called, by courtesy, our reading public, to have these silly or pernicious tales offered to them for almost nothing.... It would be no loss to us if those books cost twenty times as much as they do today. It is one of our punishments that they cost so little that everybody is tempted to read them....
It is altogether idle and irrelevant to talk of 'the lonely rancher in Dakota and the humble freedman in the South', and their consuming desire to obtain cheap literature. The question is, how do they propose to gratify that desire, fairly or feloniously? My neighbor's passionate love of light has nothing to do with his right to carry off my candles. The first point to be determined is one of righteousness. And for this we need, not 'an olive-branch', which is generally crooked, but a good, straight oaken ruler, to measure and regulate our conduct in accordance with justice.
If we will apply this standard, we shall find out where we are and what we are doing. We shall be able to see that what has been euphoniously called 'the present method of uncompensated republication of books' brings us squarely up against the moral law; and that, therefore, the Christian Church, as a 'guardian of private and public morals', is not only entitled, but also bound, to take it up, and deal with it soberly and earnestly....
The right of every man to enjoy the fruit of his own toil and the reward of his own industry is universally acknowledged as a foundation-principle of social morality: and nowhere is it more clearly stated, or more strongly enforced, than in the Bible."
- Henry van Dyke, The national sin of literary piracy (Charles Scribner's Sons, 1888)
[File under: "nothing new under the sun"]
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