What a Copyright Is.

A copyright, dear sir Harry, is a legal right to a copy. Suppose you and your friend Delano, four doors away, should publish a book that proved as popular as—well, let us say Trilby, or Ben-Hur, or Uncle Tom's Cabin did. If you send out a few copies and put upon them no legal proprietary mark, other persons seeing the demand could and would take your work, make copies of it, sell them, pocket the money, and give you nothing for what perhaps cost you a great deal of effort. If, however, you observe the legal forms, and your book proves saleable, other persons are prevented from making additional copies. Those who want copies must buy them from you. The legal form is very simple. Before you publish the book, paper, print, or whatever it is, you mail two copies to the Librarian of Congress, Washington, with $1. He returns to you a paper, duly signed, setting forth the fact that for a certain number of years that article belongs to you. You state this fact on each copy published, and then the profit is yours, and the law protects you in it.