Letters of Note: Mark Twain on copyright

Letters of Note - which is highly recommended reading at all times - has reproduced this letter by Mark Twain about US copyright law - more specifically about its failure to deal with cheap imports from Canada, and an early example I think of an international exhaustion rule. I think he should have been complaining about Canadian copyright law (which at the time was presumably Imperial copyright) - or perhaps about his own country's Declaration of Independence, or USexit as we might now call it. Which reminds me: one of the many, many disastrous effects of the UK leaving the EU (should it ever actually happen) will perhaps be the revival of the argument that exhaustion should happen globally - and without the constraints of EU law (and the more general constraint of the EU project) it will be harder to resist ... no doubt it would be hard to go the international exhaustion route if we remain in the single market, but that looks like an increasingly less likely outcome: if we want the single market we have to accept free movement, so the outcome is virtually identical to what we already have, and no doubt those who believe we are better off out of the EU will prefer to go for broke and cast the UK adrift in the stormy seas of global trade under the auspices of the WTO.

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