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Samuel Roth: Discourteous Reprinter

Samuel Roth: Discourteous Reprinter ROBERT SPOO Samuel Roth was a pirate who abided by the copyright law. Rarely accused of infringing anyone’s copyright, he built his career on the resources of the American public domain. US copyright law in 1925 was isolationist and protectionist; its technicalities were a constant worry to foreign-domiciled authors like James Joyce who could not always satisfy the rigid statutory conditions for copyright protection. Among those conditions was the requirement that English-language books be typeset, printed, and bound on American soil within a fixed number of months after publication abroad, on pain of loss of US copyright forever. Confronted with these legal hurdles and shadowed by a reputation for indecency, Joyce made no attempt to secure US copyright for the book version of Ulysses or for the early published fragments of ‘Work in Progress’. These works lay in the American public domain, where Roth found them. So the question ‘Did he have permission?’ may be answered, initially, in the affirmative: Roth’s reprinting of Joyce’s writings was permitted by US law. He was a lawful opportunist. Yet we call him a ‘pirate’ and probably always will. We sense that he violated some unwritten law of good faith and fair dealing, http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Dublin James Joyce Journal James Joyce Research Center @ University College Dublin

Samuel Roth: Discourteous Reprinter

Spoo, Robert E.
Dublin James Joyce Journal , Volume 5 – Mar 10, 2013
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Publisher
James Joyce Research Center @ University College Dublin
Copyright
Copyright UCD James Joyce Research Centre and National Library of Ireland
ISSN
2009-4507

Abstract

ROBERT SPOO Samuel Roth was a pirate who abided by the copyright law. Rarely accused of infringing anyone’s copyright, he built his career on the resources of the American public domain. US copyright law in 1925 was isolationist and protectionist; its technicalities were a constant worry to foreign-domiciled authors like James Joyce who could not always satisfy the rigid statutory conditions for copyright protection. Among those conditions was the requirement that English-language books be typeset, printed, and bound on American soil within a fixed number of months after publication abroad, on pain of loss of US copyright forever. Confronted with these legal hurdles and shadowed by a reputation for indecency, Joyce made no attempt to secure US copyright for the book version of Ulysses or for the early published fragments of ‘Work in Progress’. These works lay in the American public domain, where Roth found them. So the question ‘Did he have permission?’ may be answered, initially, in the affirmative: Roth’s reprinting of Joyce’s writings was permitted by US law. He was a lawful opportunist. Yet we call him a ‘pirate’ and probably always will. We sense that he violated some unwritten law of good faith and fair dealing,

Journal

Dublin James Joyce Journal – James Joyce Research Center @ University College Dublin

Published: Mar 10, 2013

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