Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain

(Oxford University Press) For much of America’s history, copyright laws provided little or no protection for works published abroad. American publishers often published works by authors such as Charles Dickens, James Joyce, and Ezra Pound without providing the authors any compensation. Robert Spoo explains how a frustrated James Joyce took one such publisher to court, thus launching the issues surrounding piracy, U.S. copyright law, and the public domain into the public consciousness. Spoo is Chapman Distinguished Chair at the University of Tulsa College of Law.