IP: Charles Babbage and the Anglo-American Copyright Dispute

[Dave Farber <farber () central cis upenn edu>]

In view of the above question from your recent posting I could not resist
sending you a copy of a brief article that I recently submitted to the
Annals of the History of Computing. (The sting is in the last sentence!)


Cheers


Brian




=====




                       Charles Babbage and the
                   Anglo-American Copyright Dispute


                            Brian Randell


                    Department of Computing Science
                   University of Newcastle upon Tyne


In June 1995 I visited the magnificent Huntingdon Museum and Library in
Pasadena, California. While checking one of the card indexes I came across
an entry for Charles Babbage, listing him as one of the authors of an 1837
petition to the U.S. Senate. This turned out to be a large folded
parchment, much of which was taken up by a list of names, and a set of 51
signatures, either on the manuscript itself, or (as with the case of
Charles Babbage) cut out from, presumably, a letter and pasted to the
manuscript. The main text on the manuscript started:


"Address of certain Authors of Great Britain to the Senate of the United
States in Congress assembled.
Respectfully showing:
That authors of Great Britain have long been exposed to injury in their
reputation and property from the want of a law by which the exclusive right
to their respective writings may be secured to them in the United States of
America;
That, for want of such a law, deep and extensive injuries have of late been
afflicted on their reputation and property, and on the interests of
literature and science, which ought to constitute a bond of union and
friendship between the United States and Great Britain; ..."


I was not aware that Charles Babbage had ever been involved in any such
protest - later checking confirmed that there was no mention of it in
either Babbage's own autobiographical work "Passages From the Life of a
Philosopher"  [Babbage 1864] , or in the standard Babbage biography  [Hyman
1982] . However, a little research led me to a book  [Barnes 1974]  in
which this petition is described, and to belatedly realizing that the issue
of copyright had for much of the last century been a significant bone of
contention between Britain and the U.S.A. Quoting from the Preface to the
book:


"In 1838 Parliament passed legislation enabling Great Britain to become a
party to international copyright agreement, and in the following decades a
number of such treaties were signed with European states. However,
Americans were suspicious about international copyright and feared that it
meant exploitation and domination of their book trade. As a young nation
the United States wanted the freedom to borrow literature as well as
technology from any quarter of the globe, and it was not until 1891 that
Congress finally recognized America's literary independence by authorizing
reciprocal copyright agreements with foreign powers."


Barnes gives a full account of the circumstances surrounding the
preparation and submission of the petition, though does not list the
signatories. Apparently the petition received much publicity at the time,
and was reprinted in full, complete with list of signatories, in England in
the Metropolitan Magazine  [Anon 1837] , as well as in official
congressional records  [U.S. Senate 1837] . It was, I gather, the subject
of a number of contemporary American newspaper articles. For example,
[Anon 1837]  quotes the New York Daily Express as saying:


"This Memorial is probably one of the most valuable collections of English
autographs in this country. It is on parchment, and contains the signatures
of almost all of the distinguished literary men [sic] in Great Britain."
To my untutored eye, comparatively few of the names of the signatories are
familiar. Those that are include Benjamin D'Israeli, Peter Marc Roget,
Thomas Carlyle, and Robert Southey. There are also various other
individuals whose names are known to me mainly from my having read of their
association with Charles Babbage, such as Charles Lyell, Mary Somerville,
Harriet Martineau, and Lucien Bonaparte.


Various versions of the petition were printed and circulated, and the exact
list of signatories varies slightly. (Charles Dickens is recorded as having
stated that he signed the petition, but no copy has been found bearing his
signature.) The two published versions referenced above vary very slightly
- the version in the congressional records is almost identical to the
Huntingdon Library's manuscript, which is resumably the original - the
provenance of this manuscript is not now known.


According to  [Barnes 1974]  the petition was presented to the Senate by
Senator Henry Clay of Kentucky on 2 February 1837 and by a Representative
from New York State, Churchill Cambreleng, to the House on 13 February. A
Select Committee was set up soon afterwards by the Senate to consider the
issue, and recommended that copyright legislation be adopted. Senator Clay
presented a Bill to this effect, but nothing came of it - as indicated
earlier, the dispute was to drag on for more than fifty more years!


A full listing of the signatories, or indeed of the 600-word text of the
petition, leave alone a detailed account of the long-lasting Anglo-American
copyright dispute, would be inappropriate for this journal - interested
readers can pursue the matter further via the references listed below.
However, it is a matter of some amusement to me that over a century and a
half after the person who is sometimes described as the godfather of the
computer was in dispute with the U.S. Government over copyright issues, the
U.S. Government finds itself on the opposite side of similar disputes with
various other nations - though these nations could hardly be described as
young, except perhaps in relation to computer technology.


References
 [Anon 1837] Anon, "International Copyright Law", Metropolitan Magazine,
XVIII, pp.412-8, 1837.
[Babbage 1864] C. Babbage, Passages From the Life of a Philosopher,
Longman, Green, Longman and Roberts (Reprinted 1969 by Augustus S. Kelley,
New York), London, 1864.
[Barnes 1974] J. J. Barnes, Authors, Publishers and Politicians: The Quest
for an Anglo-American Copyright Agreement 1815-1854, 311p., Routledge &
Kegan Paul, London, 1974.
[Hyman 1982] A. Hyman, Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer, Oxford
Univ. Press, Oxford, 1982.
[U.S. Senate 1837] U.S. Senate, "Petition of Thomas Moore, and Other
Authors of Great Britain, Praying Congress to grant to them the Exclusive
Benefit of their Writings within the United States", in Public Documents
Printed by Order of the Senate 24th Congress, 2nd Session II Part 134, U.S.
Government, Washington, 1837.




Dept. of Computing Science, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne,
NE1 7RU, UK
EMAIL = Brian.Randell () newcastle ac uk   PHONE = +44 191 222 7923
FAX = +44 191 222 8232  URL = http://www.cs.ncl.ac.uk/~brian.randell/