This great question is of especial interest at the present time, in consequence of opinions and demands put forward by Canada with relation to Copyright property in the United Kingdom. It appears that for some time past a correspondence has been carried on between the Canadian Government and the Imperial authorities upon the subject of “Copyright-Law in Canada.” This “Correspondence” (having been laid before the Canadian Parliament) has been printed and published. It commences with a resolution of the Canadian Senate (passed 15th of May, 1868) that the Governor-General should be prayed “to impress upon Her Majesty’s Government the _justice and expediency_ of extending the _privileges_ of the Imperial Copyright Act, 1847, so that whenever reasonable provision and protection shall, in Her Majesty’s opinion, be secured to the authors, _Colonial reprints_ of British Copyright works shall be placed on the same footing as foreign reprints in Canada, by which means British authors will be more effectually protected in their rights, _and a material benefit will be conferred on the printing industry of the Dominion_.”... All the North-American colonies soon availed themselves of this Act of 1847, and Orders in Council were founded upon them; the rights of British authors being deemed sufficiently protected by an _ad valorem_ import duty of 20 per cent. upon the value of the “foreign reprints,” that, being about _one-tenth_ of the price of the works as published in England! There appears to have been no debate in either House upon this Act of 1847, and it seems to have escaped all public notice on the part of British authors and publishers during its progress in Parliament. From the time Her Majesty’s Orders in Council enabled the colonies to avail themselves of that Act, it has operated as a stimulus and considerable premium to the “legalised robbery” of British Copyright property in the United States, and has, practically, given printers and publishers there a monopoly in “foreign reprints” of English books. The Act of 1847 is, therefore, a partial confiscation of those Copyrights which have been acquired in England under Earl Stanhope’s Act of 1842, because the colonies have, for the last twenty years, been almost exclusively supplied with English books by United States reprints of those books....