a physical actuality; or a copyright given for the flight of fancy of a poet not embodied in the materiality of a manuscript or in the pages of a printed book. John Milton sold Paradise Lost to Samuel Simmons, bookseller, for five pounds ready money; but Gray's "mute, inglorious Miltons," who only imagined and never wrote, could never have obtained a copyright or any money offer whatever—no, not even reputation—for their imaginings, though for all that the world knows they might have been infinitely superior to the Milton who became glorious because he was not mute, in all that relates to mental attainment.
"A person can read from a book, can quote from it, use its ideas in speaking and writing, and even attempt to pass them off as his own, and he will find no legal obstacle to such action. But the moment he tries to duplicate the material form in which the ideas appeared, that moment he passes from the realm of the intangible to that of the tangible"; for the book, which is the concrete thing in which the author has embodied his ideas, is an entity, and because an entity representing embodied labor is property which the law will protect to the owner, and can also legitimately tax, if it will. There have been repeated decisions by the courts[1] that there can be no property in ideas—until, for example, an author through a copyright, or an inventor through a patent, has put his ideas in such tangible form that the Government can put its stamp upon them.
It is also exceedingly curious to note how Shakespeare, whose range and accuracy of knowledge were so wonderful, clearly perceived, and as clearly expressed, the whole essence of modern political economy and jurisprudence in respect to this immediate problem, when, in the following lines from A Midsummer-Night's Dream, he says:
"The poet's eye, in a fine frenzy rolling,
Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven,
And, as imagination bodies forth
The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen
Turns them to shapes, and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a name."
- ↑ Some years since an action was brought in a United States court by one Kortenhaus against the American Watch Company, of Waltham, Mass., to recover royalties on an improvement in stem-winding watches that he made, and which, he averred, the defendants had put to use without his consent and without awarding him any compensation therefor. The plaintiff swore that he had submitted his invention to the company's inspection with the view of selling it, but it refused to purchase, and he discovered afterward that the company had adopted the improvement, and that he had made the mistake of not patenting it. The court dismissed the action, and ruled that there was no right of property in an idea as an idea, and that it could only be made property by letters patent. Had, however, a patent been secured upon the improvement, its value as property would have been undoubtedly very considerable.
