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Copyright & Its Discontents Robert Spoo. Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xvi + 355 pp. $35.00
IN 1927, frustrated with the ban on importation of Ulysses into the United States and even more with American copyright law, James Joyce added several references to his novel's legal problems in America to chapter seven of "Work in Progress," Finnegans Wake. Most obviously, these include the reference to the USA as the land of "the roth, vice and blause" as well as the description of Shem's writings, like Ulysses, as "obscene matter not protected by copriright in the United Stars of Ourania" (Finnegans Wake 176.23, 185.30-31). These passages refer to three key elements in Joyce's relationship to the American legal and publishing establishment: the ban on Ulysses as an obscene text, a copyright law that deprived foreign authors of the rights to their own writings, and Samuel Roth's unauthorized publication of Joyce's works in two of his periodicals. These elements were intimately linked: a complaint from the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice led to the banning of Ulysses; the ban meant Joyce could not publish an unexpurgated version of his novel in the United States and therefore could not claim copyright on it, because American law required that English language works published in other countries be published anew in the United States within a few months of their original publication or forever forfeit any claim to American copyright; and the lack of copyright meant that Roth was free to print what were often botched (and expurgated) versions of Ulysses and "Work in Progress" without getting Joyce's permission or paying him royalties. Thus "the roth" and "vice"-Samuel Roth and the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice-are closely connected in one passage, while the other transforms "copyright" into "copriright" and "America" to "Ourania," implying that the true obscenity is American copyright law. The passages did nothing to change copyright law, but they are a reminder of a time when the United States, standing by its protectionist laws and refusing to sign the Berne Convention (1886), created what Robert Spoo, in With- out Copyrights, calls "legal conditions that permitted and even encouraged" the pirating...