Let an author be empowered to sell the Copyright of his work to a particular publisher for the space of five years only—a term at the end of which nine-tenths of the works now published are completely forgotten. Let it then become public property, in the same way that a play, on being published, becomes public property, since Mr. Bulwer’s Act. As a manager now has the right to act any play he chooses, on paying a certain sum to the author for each night of representation, so let any printer have the right to print any work on paying a certain sum to the author for each copy he issues. The main, perhaps the only, objection to the plan would be the necessity of establishing some Excise regulations, with regard to printing-offices, for the prevention of fraud. The great recommendation, of course, would be, that of every work of reputation we should have cheap and elegant editions; that such of them as required comment and illustration (and now, when the Copyrights expire, it is speedily found that very few of them do not) would receive it at an earlier period, and that the works of living authors would be much more extensively diffused than they are, while their interest would, it is hoped, be advanced in an equal proportion to their fame. After all, however, we are afraid that no Copyright Act, however favourable to authors, will exercise a perceptible beneficial influence on literature. Our own at present is frivolous, and it is assigned as a cause that our authors are ill-protected. If this be really the cause, in what sort of a state ought that of Germany to be? It is, however, in the very country where piracy is most prevalent that solid literature is most flourishing. Unhappily, no Act of Parliament can reform the taste of the public. (Extract from the _Mechanics’ Magazine_, Vol. 29, 1839.)