Tom Bell on a World Without Copyrights

What would happen if authors and publishers could not count on copyright to protect them from piracy? History hints at the answer, Tom Bell writes. From the founding of the United States until well into the 20th century, domestic copyright laws generally denied foreign authors any form of legal redress. Yet as the legal scholar Robert Spoo explains in Without Copyrights, they developed other stratagems to recoup the costs of writing, producing, and marketing their works.