Mark Twain was a brilliant author, philosopher, and humorist, but he was

also a man made quite nervous by copyright. Copyright didn't bother him in

principle, of course. It benefited him greatly as one of the leading writers

of his day. What bothered him about copyright was the fact that it would eventually

expire, leaving his heirs without a way to make an easy buck. Twain didn't want

perpetual copyright, only something that would cover his children's lives. He

noted on more than one occasion that the grandkids should fend for themselves, but for Twain and his daughters, he sought to combat "the pirates."

Twain has been criticized for his pro-author views on copyright, which oscillated throughout his career between degrees of hatred for publishers. How he responded to the impending expiration of his copyrights is, I argue, quite genius. Twain concocted a scheme whereby he would augment his existing copyrighted works on the eve of their entry into the public domain in order to create a new, copyrighted work. The original work would pass into the public domain, but Twain reasoned that the newer, augmented works would outsell public domain materials if they offered something extra. In short, he speculated about trying to create value from his older works that would be copyrightable.

As this 1906 New York Times article notes (which I found catching up on Boing Boing), Twain "looks upon the copyright law as pure robbery." His objection was simple: he knew that his works would likely continue to be popular long after their (then) 42 years of copyright protection expired. Maybe this wouldn't have bothered Twain much were it not for the fact that he was convinced that public domain works were nothing more than free source materials for publishers to pick up, print, and make money on (without paying an author). Twain feared that publishers would continue to print his works without paying him, and thus they'd continue to rake in the dough while his heirs got none. And, as Twain once noted, while authors die, "publishers" don't. For their efforts, Twain called them "pirates," for they did as true pirates do: "take" things that aren't "theirs" and profit from it.

Twain's solution would have been ridiculous in actual practice. He imagined printing portions of his (then unpublished) autobiography intermixed with his older works, in new binding. The result would be a copy of, e.g., Tom Sawyer that also had the introduction to Twain's life printed on the bottom half of each page. As the old Times article points out, the idea was to tie moments in Twain's autobiography to scenes in his works. To be sure, it's a very creative approach to creating a "new work." It doesn't prevent the original from passing into the public domain, but the author is free to try and create competing works for his benefit.

Twain was no hero of copyright, having in his later years become a staunch advocate of extending copyright against the "pirates." Twain so distrusted the publishers that he even said that such "pirates" were the true beneficiaries of the copyright law, since the law eventually delivered to them via the hand of the government all the world's literary treasures, which they could print without paying the author or heirs.

In any case, like so many things Twain, the story brought a smile to my face as I thought about how ingenious the man was in the face of a challenge, even something like copyright terms that he found unfavorable. While he stumped for copyright extensions (which eventually did come, obviating the need for his schemes), Twain was at least on to one important point: you can and must compete with "free." In Twain's situation, "free" was the threat of publishers who could use his works without paying him. Today "free" takes on a new level of meaning, since so many copyrighted works can be shared without an intervening publisher. Yet the point still stands: Twain understood how the value of copyrighted works could change over time, and he imagined a scenario in which he would creatively try to enliven old works to renew their commercial aspects to compete against works that would not benefit him commercially. Much has changed since 1906, but not the need for intelligent vigilance or business ingenuity.