Book Pirating in Taiwan [Reprint 2016 ed.] 9781512817225

Table of contents :
Preface
Contents
1. Through Tara’s Halls: The Beginnings of Copyright
2. Pan Ch’uan: Literary Property in the East
3. A Lick and a Promise: First Attempts at Resolution
4. EB and the Gathering Storm
5. Ames and Industry Response
6. The Political and Diplomatic Fronts
7. The Carrot and the Stick: Reactions on Taiwan
8. And Never the Twain . . . : Negotiations Flounder
9. With Opium and Gold: The Smuggling of Books
10. Hope Springs Eternal . . . : New Efforts to Bargain
11. Dashed Hopes and Greater Chaos: The Situation Worsens
12. This Point Whither: The Present Scene and Current Trends
Appendix: Death of a President; a Case Study
Index

Citation preview

Book Pirating in Taiwan

Book Pirating in Taiwan

by David Kaser

University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia

Copyright © 1969 by the Trustees of the University of Pennsylvania Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 69-12289

SBN 8122-7591-8 Printed in the United States of America

To Jane who makes all things right

Preface

My concern for the subject of this report has developed out of two earlier research interests. The first, which has engaged my attention for more than a decade and about which I have written several books and shorter papers, is the history of the American publishing industry during the period when it was peopled with the world's most prolific book pirates. The second and more recent related interest has been the state of the contemporary publishing industry in the Orient. Prior to the present study I had the privilege of participating in two surveys of book activities in the Far East, and it was during them that I first came face-to-face with large-quantity modern book piracy. The confluence of these two research interests whetted my curiosity to learn more about book piracy and smuggling where it is most rampant today; namely, on the island of Taiwan. With benefit therefore of a generous Guggenheim Fellowship and an equally generous sabbatical leave from the Joint University Libraries (of Vanderbilt University, George Peabody College, and Scarritt College), I spent much of 1967 examining the subject and its repercussions both in the Far East and in the United States. The present book is a report upon that examination. In this volume I do not presume to propose solutions to the problem of book piracy in Taiwan; solutions can only come through extended, good-faith negotiations between Western publishers and Chinese booksellers and the enlightened self-interest of both groups. I attempt rather to review the many important considerations, events, and circumstances—some well known, and some for the most part unrecognized—that have interplayed to permit the problem to arise and persist, and I

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would hope that this monograph could prove useful as a background document to the principals involved as they search for solutions. I am obliged to many persons and agencies for assistance in the preparation of the report—many more than can be mentioned here. Primary acknowledgment, of course, must go to the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation and to the Joint University Libraries; without their participation I could not have made the study. I am also grateful for the gracious and hospitable response I received from virtually the entire Taiwan book trade. Especially helpful were Choh Chin-Shin of the Southeast Book Company; Jack Chow of the Bookcase Shop and Chairman of the Taipei Foreign Booksellers Association, and his partner C. P. Chang; Liao Chin-Chin of Eurasia Book Company; Sueling Li of Mei Ya Publications; and Sun Kuo-Jen of the Rainbow-Bridge Book Company. The fact that I do not mention others by name does not mean that their help is any less remembered. First acknowledgment of help from the American publishing industry must be made to McGraw-Hill's knowledgeable Basil Dandison and to Prentice-Hall's Leo Albert; I also appreciate greatly the assistance and encouragement I received from Silver-Burdett's Erroll Michener and from McGraw-Hill's Emerson Brown. The trade associations were very helpful to me, and I should like to express here my appreciation to Kyrill Schabert of the American Book Publishers Council, Austin McCaffrey and Peter Smith of the American Textbook Publishers Institute, and especially to Robert Frase of the two groups' joint Washington office, whose records and recollections of the subject were invaluable to me. Government officials, both of the Republic of China and of the United States, gave much-appreciated guidance and encouragement. Hsiung Dun-Sheng and Chu Yu-Ing of the GRC's Ministry of Interior were good help, as were Oliver Bongard of the American Embassy in Taipei and George E. Sadler, Chief of the Agency for International Development's

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Central Book Activities in Washington. Again I must emphasize that my failure to mention others by name is to be attributed to shortage of space rather than ingratitude. This book, in short, is similar to all other monographs in that although it was organized and drafted by an individual, it could never have been concluded without the expenditure upon it of the time of many persons. I gladly acknowledge my debt therefore to all who aided me. Nashville, Tennessee January 1, 1968

D. K.

Contents

1. Through Tara's Halls: The Beginnings of Copyright

3

2. Pan Ch'uan: Literary Property in the East

17

3. A Lick and a Promise: First Attempts at Resolution

29

4. EB and the Gathering Storm

40

5. Ames and Industry Response

53

6. The Political and Diplomatic Fronts

65

7. The Carrot and the Stick: Reactions on Taiwan

77

8. And Never the Twain . . . : Negotiations Flounder

88

9. With Opium and Gold: The Smuggling of Books

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10. Hope Springs Eternal . . . : New Efforts to Bargain

113

11. Dashed Hopes and Greater Chaos: The Situation Worsens

128

12. This Point Whither: The Present Scene and Current Trends

142

Appendix: Death of a President; a Case Study

147

Index

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Book Pirating in Taiwan

i

. . . Through Tara's Halls, The Beginnings of Copyright

It is said that in the sixth century A.D.—at a time when Irish history and legend were fancifully interwoven—the learned St. Columba went to visit his old master Finnian. During his stay the young scholar secretly shut himself up in the church at night and proceeded without permission to make a copy of the old abbott's psalter, the light needed for the task emanating mysteriously from his left hand as he wrote. A wanderer noted the eerie light and, peering through the church keyhole, observed St. Columba at his nefarious work. Suddenly a crane that was roosting in the church put his bill through the hole and plucked out the wanderer's eye. When the affair was reported to the abbott, he became irate and demanded that Columba deliver over to him the pirated manuscript, but the young scholar refused. The dispute was placed before King Diarmid, sitting at Tara. After deliberation the King decreed: " T o every cow her calf; therefore to every book its copy," thus resolving the case in favor of Finnian. T h e homely wisdom of King Diarmid in this early case of Irish piracy is remarkable in that the seemingly contradictory legal and ethical considerations involved in it have continued to plague authors, solicitors, booksellers and publishers, judges, and scholars for more than a millenium since. The last briefs in book piracy cases, moreover, have not yet been filed; the final arguments have not yet been presented; the final judgments have not yet been rendered. In support of good King Diarmid's decision, however, are myriad cases of literary piracy which have subsequently been found for the plaintiffs; innumerable laws which have since that time been promulgated to

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protect literary property; and many bilateral and multilateral treaties, agreements, and conventions which have in recent times been concluded to safeguard literary rights. The philosophical basis for copyright protection is as simple and clear today as it was in Columba's time. It is that a literary work is the chattel of the persons—authors and printers—who create it and should be as protected from thievery as a physical object. Permission to copy, according to this view, resides in the proprietor of the original, until he is ready to give, barter, or otherwise deed it away. This simple foundation for copyright protection has been frequently challenged, some people frankly disagreeing with the whole principle. The counterposing view is that literary work is part of the cultural heritage of all men and should be freely available to everyone. Henry C. Carey, the important nineteenth-century American publisher-economist, believed that ideas are always with us and are not patentable because authors contribute nothing new; they merely shuffle "knowns" around into different sequences. As will be seen later, many other subsidiary and frequently specious reasons for and against copyright have during the past four hundred years been raised, argued, and not always resolved. Early protection in the English-language press followed the chartering of the Stationers' Company of London in 1556. As matters of mutual respect and fear of retaliation, the members of this company policed themselves and observed a form of "copyright" implied by the registration of new titles under the bylaws of the company. By the last decade of the seventeenth century, however, three concurrent developments were pointing toward the need for some kind of statutory protection to buttress the earlier "trade courtesies." These developments were : 1. the historically received tradition of granting crown patents and later Stationers' Company licenses to such works as had successfully passed the scrutiny of Church and/or State;

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2. the practical monopoly held by the Stationers' Company on printing and bookselling in London and environs; 3. the spread of printing into the villages and small towns where it was less susceptible to the control of the Stationers' Company. Even in the cities, of course, there had also long been clandestine presses ready to bootleg supposedly heretical books or pamphlets of unhealthy political persuasion, and many of these presses found it a simple and profitable venture to shift their efforts to the reproduction without permission of popular licensed works. Things by 1700 were beginning to get out of hand, and the London booksellers repeatedly petitioned for relief by law, relief which finally came in 1710 with passage of the so-called "Statute of 8 Anne." This celebrated statute took into account both of the aforementioned views of literary rights by: (1) granting protection to an author or his assigns; but, (2) only for a limited period of fourteen years, renewable for a second period of fourteen years. Confiscation of unauthorized reproductions was one of the penalties for piracy. Unfortunately, it soon became clear that the Statute of 8 Anne left important issues unresolved—such as the fate of a text upon expiration of its twenty-eight years of protection—and piracy cases abounded in the English and Scottish courts during the eighteenth century. Scottish printer-booksellers especially were vigorous pirates, and at least one, Alexander Donaldson of Edinburgh, candidly opened a shop in London and sold low-priced northern reprints of deceased authors, frankly challenging "the right of copy" by claiming that the works he was selling had come into the public domain. Much of the unclarity of the statute was finally resolved by a far-reaching decision in the House of Lords in 1774 in the case of Donaldson v. Becket, which adjudged that upon expiration of the statutory period a published work did indeed become public property.

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These principles form the pattern for most copyright laws today. No comprehensive history of literary piracy has ever been written, but when it is it will make good reading because it will be replete with intrigue, subterfuge, and human drama. There has always been profit enough in piracy so that it has gone on somewhere. In the eighteenth century many underground and country presses in England kept the London book stalls flooded with cheap, unsigned reprints. Ireland especially, with its time-honored unconcern for the vagaries of English law, was a center of rampant piracy. Cheap reprints could also be reproduced and smuggled into England from the Low Countries, which had enjoyed a kind of rambunctious, free-wheeling publishing industry ever since they became a haven for religious refugees in the sixteenth century. A new dimension, however, to the piracy problem in the English-language publishing world was just beginning to emerge at the time of Donaldson v. Becket; that was the rapidly burgeoning printing capability of England's brash young colonies across the Atlantic. It is doubtful that the works of American colonial authors had protection under the laws governing the colonies, but soon after Union—early in 1783—Connecticut passed the first copyright law in the New World. It was followed later the same year by similar laws in Massachusetts, Maryland, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island. The Constitution, of course, prepared the way for a national copyright law, and in 1790 Congress enacted provision "for the encouragement of learning, by securing copies of maps, charts, and books, to authors and proprietors of such copies, during the times therein stipulated." The American law, however, limited protection to authors resident in the United States, thus making English works fair game to the printers of the new nation. Indeed, Blackstone's Commentaries themselves had pointed out that parliamentary authority did not extend to Ireland, the Channel Isles, nor to the American colonies, so unauthorized reprinting of English texts in enormous quantities could, and did, occur

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with impunity in those places. Respect for English rights was low in all of American society at that time, and the book industry was no exception. Furthermore, the American printing community was peopled to a very large degree by immigrant Irish printers, than whom none could have found greater glee in turning things English to their personal profit. From Irish printing offices had come Christopher Talbot to Philadelphia; Joseph Charless, who established the first trans-Mississippi press; Patrick Byrne, who became important as a Philadelphia law publisher; Bernard Dornin, America's first purveyor exclusively of Catholica; Mary Carroll, who came to America alone at age fourteen and sold books in New Orleans until her death in the cholera plague of 1833; George Keatinge to Baltimore; John Henry to Vermont; Moses Dawson to Cincinnati; Matthew Lyon, who became a solon from Kentucky; and, of course, the storied firebrand, Mathew Carey who, dressed as a woman, fled a Dublin bailiff in 1784 to establish America's largest publishing house and to become the most active and vigorous reprinter of English books. All dealt in America's extensive piratical trade. T h e attitude of the American industry toward reprinting at that time was never better expressed than by the immigrant Dublin bookseller, Robert Bell of Philadelphia, who wrote in 1771 as follows: Surely the precedent of the people of Ireland's reprinting every work produced in London, and the great Lawyer Blackstone's authority concerning the internal legislation of colonies are demonstrations of the rectitude of reprinting any, or every work of excellence in America, without the smallest infringement of the British embargo upon literature—Is it not enough that their embargo prevents Americans f r o m shipping their manufactures of this kind into Britain.—Would it not be incompatible with all freedom, if an American's mind must be entirely starved and enslaved in the barren regions of fruitless vacuity, because he doth not wallow in immense riches equal to some British

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Lords, the origin of whose progenitors are lost in the chaos of antiquity? So reprint he did, and reprint also did almost all of Bell's fellow printers for a century thereafter. Virtually every new book of consequence to appear in London before 1825 was reproduced immediately in Philadelphia, New York, Baltimore, and/or Boston, usually over several imprints. Sir Walter Scott was so popular in the United States that an announcement in an English review of a new forthcoming Waverley novel caused a great stir among America's major publishing houses. Each maintained an agent in the London trade to acquire the first copy he could get his hands on of a new, promising work and to ship it by fastest packet to his American correspondent. There the work would be broken down into signatures and distributed, sometimes to as many as twenty different printing offices, who kept compositors and pressmen working around the clock until the work was printed. Binders meanwhile stood by ready to slap the books into boards and tack the already printed paper labels onto the spines, so they could be dumped half wet into the eagerly awaiting market before a rival edition could take the edge off the public curiosity. Although illegal, shipments of the reprints were sometimes even dispatched to London where they could far undersell the legitimate and better-made English editions. The London trade was understandably distressed at this total disinterest of their American counterparts in the traditional courtesies and statutes that had long kept their industry at peace. The real confusion and chaos that resulted from American reprinting, however, occurred not in England but in the American printing trades themselves where even so little as one day's priority in the market with a best-seller could gain or lose a small fortune. In the interest of speed, workmanship became shoddier and shoddier, and practices became shadier and shadier, until finally a novel could be printed and put into the market within twenty-four hours of receipt of the copy. Much

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more important than the time required to compose and print a novel, however, was a different and totally uncontrollable aspect of this competition. It was the time required for copy to cross the Atlantic; a copy of a new novel on one ship might cross the ocean in five weeks whereas another departing an hour later might require nine. This single, awful, variable factor introduced a strong note of speculation into the American reprint trade. American houses came shortly to realize, however, that if earlier copy could somehow be got they would not need a finished London book in order to gain this much-sought priority. London agents therefore were authorized to negotiate direct with English publishers for early proofs of newly appearing works and later with authors themselves for second copies of manuscripts. Through these devices it sometimes happened that a "reprint" appeared in Philadelphia before the original was truly published in London. The reprint, of course, since it was not written by a resident of the United States, was in no way protected in this country and was therefore subject to immediate re-piracy by neighboring printers. Thus early copy was never worth more to the first American publisher than he could recoup in sales during the two or three days that he had it exclusively. It never took his competitors long to reprint his best titles. One Saturday in March 1823, Carey & Lea leased the express mail coach from Philadelphia to New York, loaded it with their damp new edition of Scott's Peveril of the Peak, and instructed their New York outlet not to sell a single copy until Monday morning. "If you do," Carey warned, "Harpers will print it on Sunday and be in the Market on Monday." Sale of the Carey book in New York was deferred until Monday, but it still gained only one day, because Harpers' edition of the title was printed and available for purchase exactly twenty-one hours following their acquisition of a Carey copy. Competition for early copy, however, did have one salutary effect upon the American book industry; it gave American houses their first precedent for paying for copy at all. Prior to this time there was no such thing in America as royalty

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payment to an author for a work, nor for that matter were manuscripts ever purchased. Authors could earn from their works only by buying their own printing and then leaving copies with booksellers on consignment, publishing thus entirely at their own risk. Publishers insisted that if they had to pay money for a manuscript from an American author the resulting price of the book, when compared to the price of a royalty-free English reprint, would render it totally unsalable in the American market. At first this was true, and American authorship languished. By the 1820's, however, with retail prices of reprints rising to cover the purchase cost of early English copy, American houses began to realize that they could now purchase an American manuscript without rendering the ultimate price of the book uncompetitive and, since it was authored by an American resident, have a copyrighted book to boot. Thus in 1826 James Fenimore Cooper was able to peddle his Last of the Mohicans to Carey & Lea for the then unheard-of price of $5,000 for 5,000 copies and rights to the book for five years. Not until this time did American authorship truly begin to thrive. Confusion in the trade, however, continued. There was enormous distrust; many competent publishers simply cursed the business and left it, although others remained on through these rough days, and their imprints are in some cases numbered now among the most respected in the nation. Efforts to establish cooperative ventures, guilds, or associations were uniformly unsuccessful. An American Company of Booksellers was established in 1802, but it failed within a year. A similar enterprise was attempted two decades later but with the same results. Even efforts to band together locally for the good of the book trade—as in Lexington, Kentucky, in 1805—failed because of overzealous self-interest rather than a sincere desire on the part of the principals to raise the standards and ethics of the industry as a whole. With these bleak conditions obtaining, a dynamic, aggressive, able—and swashbuckling—American book industry rocked along chaotically until mid-century; and a

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growing, literate American readership gorged itself on cheap reproductions of England's books. A movement meanwhile, centering primarily around men of letters and intellectuals in this country and abroad, began to make itself felt in support of some kind of international copyright protection. The way was pioneered in 1828 when Denmark first extended the provision of its domestic copyright law to foreign works on condition of reciprocity. Prussia followed suit in 1836, England in 1837, France in 1852, and Belgium—which had long shared with the United States its dubious reputation as a hotbed of literary piracy—in 1854. Following this latter date only Russia, the United States, and Asia remained outside the fold. The long and exciting history of the American movement for international copyright has been told often and well, and it does not need repeating here. It would, however, be useful to summarize some of the major arguments voiced for and against international protection during the half-century of debate that took place before it finally became adopted by the United States in 1891. These arguments, although in some cases notable for their bad logic, were influential in thinking in the United States during those formative years. Proponents of international copyright—comprising largely literary figures, intellectuals, professional men, legislators, editors, and the like, and a handful of enlightened publishers—put forth these points in support of their contention that the United States should participate in international copyright protection: 1. authorship and ideas are not respectors of international boundaries, nor should protection of those ideas be so restricted; 2. foreign authors would be guaranteed against mutilation of their works here by American publishers, anthologists, etc.;

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3. American authors would be freed from unfair competition with nonroyalty English copy; 4. American authors would benefit from reciprocal protection of their works by being increasingly reprinted abroad; 5. the book industry would be stabilized by elimination of ruthless competition and by rendering greater security to the investments of individual firms; 6. reduction of inordinate competition would make possible the production of better-made books; 7. the reading public would benefit from the more rapid development of a native American literature; 8. by having his investment protected, the publisher could issue larger editions, thereby in some cases lowering prices. These arguments did not stand long unchallenged, and a veritable war of pamphlets, speeches, congressional memorials, editorials, and other expressions of concern were put into the forum. Proponents of the status quo consisted primarily of people from the book industries, protectionists, and again some political figures. The arguments constituting their main strictures and surrejoinders can be reduced to the following basic points, arranged here indiscriminately: 1. no one has a sole right to an idea nor a literary or artistic expression; it did not belong to him originally nor did he contribute anything unique to it; 2. international copyright would necessitate higher prices for English books, thereby retarding much-needed education of America's masses; 3. English writers were being paid well enough for their works at home and should not expect income from a market for which their works were never intended; 4. English authors actually benefited from American piracy by having their reputations—albeit not their fortunes—extended thereby;

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5. English authors did not stand to gain from American adherence to international copyright, since prices in the United States would rise, and sales would end; 6. foreign authors could already gain copyright protection in the United States simply by taking u p residence there; 7. the barren state of American letters was due not to unfair competition from nonroyalty copy but rather to the fact that American works simply were not worth the cost of print and paper; 8. reciprocal international protection would not help American authors anyway, because American authors were not in demand abroad; 9. international copyright would injure the interests of the American book trade. The issue and its ramifications generated much heat in the United States during the middle years of the nineteenth century. Bills to amend the country's copyright law to allow international reciprocity were introduced into the Congress many times—fully five times between 1837 and 1842 by no less a contender than Henry Clay—but when the Civil War began in 1861 no firm action had as yet been taken on the issue. It had been beaten each time by public apathy, other pressing business in the Congress, general anti-British feeling, lack of full agreement among proponents of the measure, strong, well-organized opposition on the part of the major members of the book industry, and public fear of higher book prices. The Civil War had barely ceased, however, before agitation began again for the United States to join the international copyright movement, and an International Copyright Association was established in 1868. Despite its work and the work of others, the nation's new domestic Copyright Act of 1870 came and went without reference to the international need. Pertinent activity in the next few years is described by L e h m a n n - H a u p t as follows :

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Beginning with this date [1867] the demands for America's participation in an international arrangement became articulate, and hardly a year passed without the proposal to the Washington legislators of a new scheme or some revised older plan by a member of Congress. Three presidents successively went on record in favor of a regulation which would heal a rather painful wound in international intellectual relations. Sermons were preached by ministers on the subject, appealing to the conscience of the educated classes. In 1883 a new association was formed, the "American (Authors) Copyright L e a g u e , " followed in 1887 by the "American Publishers Copyright L e a g u e . " In spite of all of these sincere efforts the matter was postponed again and again. Not until 1891, over fifty years after the first proposal of 1837, was a measurably adequate law passed. And even then it was not ideal, not free from certain awkward limitations. But there was at long last protection available in the United States for the work of foreign authors. Virtually all informed observers of America's half-century of deliberation on international protection of literary property had professed bafflement at the nation's lack of decisiveness in the matter. At this late date, however, it appears clear that a substantial majority of the population that had any feeling for the issue at all favored international protection, but the key phrase was "that had any feeling for the matter." A sizable portion of the populace knew nothing of copyright and did nothing to encourage its consideration. Quoting again from Lehmann-Haupt: It is difficult to understand why a measure so universally desired by public spirited individuals and by professional associations of undoubted integrity should have been held off for so long. It is difficult to gather clearly from the published accounts of the controversy who

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really lead the opposition to the law so successfully, and by what means the legislative body was kept inactive over such a long period. The work of many of the opponents, of course—individuals, firms, and associations—is a matter of public record, but as Dr. Lehmann-Haupt implies, they were not strong enough to combat public apathy. The 1891 law was far from perfect. Especially controversial was a provision requiring that in order to qualify for protection a book had to be manufactured in the United States. Although generally weakened by amendment over the years, the manufacturing clause was retained in a superseding Copyright Code of 1912. All existing copyright law was subsequently brought together under Title 17 of the United States Code, enacted by Congress as of July 30, 1947, but international provisions were little affected thereby. Available to the United States since 1887 has been the so-called Beme Convention, a simple reciprocal procedure for international protection of literary rights, but the participation of the United States in this convention has been prevented by ccrtain commcrcial and labor interests that have insisted upon retention of the manufacturing clause of 1891. Many American books meanwhile have received the benefits of the Berne Convention by being published simultaneously in one of the Berne signatory nations, usually Great Britian or Canada. Meanwhile a new convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, was hammered out in the early 1950's under the auspices of UNESCO. T h e U C C furnishes substantial international protection with a minimum of red tape and is now subscribed to by most nations. T h e United States, which was a driving force in the drafting of the UCC, subscribed to it in 1956. This Convention provides for the works of the nationals of any member nation to receive, with few exceptions, protection in any other member nation on the same basis as is accorded to nationals of that second nation. No formalities of

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registration are permissible under the Universal Copyright Convention. At any rate, the growth, increasing sophistication and comprehensiveness, and the continuing geographical extension of international copyright protection has much reduced the scope of literary piracy. Indeed, with the exception of the very few nations which publish considerably but which are not signatory to the UCC or the Berne agreement, or that give no international protection under treaty or domestic law, literary piracy is today a rare thing. The balance of this treatise will report the unauthorized reprinting of English-language books in one of those nonsignatory nations—the Republic of China.

mi

2 Pan

Ch'uan:

Literary Property in the East

An extended disquisition on early Asian attitudes toward copying and literary property is regrettably not possible, as there are no documented accounts or statements of early Oriental feeling in the matter. A few generalizations, however, can probably be put forth with reasonable confidence that they are secure from serious contradiction. Certainly in the ancient traditions of China there was no clear concept of literary property. Knowledge was free. Just as Plato recorded the oral wisdom of Socrates in the West, and as the four biographers of Jesus transcribed the teachings of the Man from Galilee in the Middle East, so in Asia it was considered a high scholarly calling to collect, organize, and propagate learning whether taken from the oral or the written stream. Early Rabbinical authorities held that it was not only permissible to copy without consent but that it was also a blessing to make it possible for scribes to copy. There was no parallel, however, in the Orient for the subsequent development in the West of more restrictive attitudes toward copying. Knowledge in China was originally conceived as being in the public domain, and the nation has not yet come fully to think of it as something that can be bought and sold. Only one of Confucius' Six Classics was his own original work, the other five being the compilation and republication of ancient manuscripts, yet the glory of great scholarship redounded upon him equally for what he had preserved and transmitted as for what he had contributed of his own. It was not until the turn of the twentieth century that there was even a Chinese word for

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copyright, chu tso ch'uan or pan ch'uan being lifted at that time directly from the current Japanese codes. In their desire to extend learning the Chinese not only invented block printing but also printed from movable type fully four hundred years before Gutenberg's day. In the Orient, however, much more than in the Occident, publishing was less often thought of as good business than as a noble act of sacrifice bordering almost on philanthrophy and motivated primarily by a desire to promote academic studies and learning. Indeed, because the printing of Chinese texts, in well-nigh innumerable written characters, is so vastly more expensive than printing in alphabetic languages, publishing there long remained almost an exclusive avocation of the wealthy, carried on at considerable cost to themselves in the interest of culture, rather than becoming a commercial venture. Whereas the West can in parallel muster its own substantial roster of wealthy scholar-publishers, beginning perhaps with Aldus Manutius and the Estiennes, there have also always been in the Western world a distressing number of grubby, easy-conscienced, scoundrel-booksellers willing to apply their equipment, energies, and skills to any project wherein profit could be anticipated. This latter class was conspicuously absent from the book production community of old China, and although the industry is far less pristine today, an element of this ancient and gracious tradition still persists there. No one can say just when Chinese reprinting of Western language texts began. Old China hands have not infrequently recorded their surprise at finding Western texts in local reprintings while browsing in the stalls and shops of pre-war Hankow or Peiping. Such early reprints sit today in rather limited numbers on the shelves of the National Library of China and in other older institutions, as well as in the private collections of senior scholars, missionaries, and other American nationals who resided early in the Orient, but there has never been any attempt or reason to inventory them. It is therefore difficult to construct a meaningful sense of the extent of the reprint trade on the pre-war mainland. It is probably safe to assume, how-

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ever, that severely limited Western language reading competence there at that time kept such activity minimal. Considering the aforementioned Chinese attitude toward copy-making generally, it is probably also a safe assumption that questions of literary property, authorization to reprint, and copyright violation seldom if ever occurred to the principals involved in this early period of Chinese piracy. The legal status of the reprinting of Western books at the time was ambiguous. In 1928 China enacted a copyright law about which more will be said later, but there was no concern manifest in it for the international aspects of protection. Indeed protection of any kind for literary property was so seldom recognized as deserving of attention in China that very, very few cases of alleged violation went to litigation; precedents, although not unknown, were certainly rare. In the absence therefore of clear legal concern for reprinting, and with no social or ethical concern within the traditions of China for reprinting, there simply was no problem. When a professor at a college needed two hundred copies of an English book for his students, he took his own exemplar to a local printer and had two hundred copies made. The author and copyright holder in the United States never knew of it and consequently they never cared. H a d they known of the need in the first place, it is doubtful they would have been able to fill it themselves because their prices could not have been obtained in the local market, and they did not have the language or commercial acumen to be able to merchandise books there anyway. No one's legal or moral standards were knowingly compromised, the Chinese were happy, and the Americans were not unhappy. Who could ask for more than that? When after World War II the Government of the Republic of China removed to Taiwan from the continent— hereafter referred to as Mainland China—the preponderance of Western-language reprinting went with it. In the rush and press of social, technical, and political change during the period, however, a congeries of new circumstances began to develop

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around the industry, placing its future in a new perspective. Among these new circumstances were perhaps four that were of considerably more significance than the rest. They were: 1. The increasing availability of photo-offset equipment, with which reprinting could be accomplished much cheaper than it had been by nineteenth-century pirates who had to compose and make up their forms by hand. Now all a reprinter had to do was disassemble a book, lay out the pages in forms, photograph them, and print as many copies as he could sell. He needed minimal equipment, limited expertise, one copy of an original book, and a stock of paper. Piracy thus became more profitable than reprinters a century before had in their wildest dreams envisioned. 2. The rapid establishment of the English language as the scholarly lingua franca of the Orient. English was soon being taught in all of the schools of Taiwan, Korea, and other developing countries of the East Asia, and hundreds upon hundreds of Asian scholars were pursuing their educations in the United States. In addition, hordes of American military and civilian personnel were taking up more or less permanent residence in Asian countries. By 1963 an estimated 13,000 United States nationals resided in Taiwan alone, and another 50,000 were in nearby Okinawa. Tourists, moreover, flocked to and through the port cities of the Orient, swelling greatly the size of the potential English-language reading market in this important part of the world. 3. An enormous upsurge in the need for current information on a wide range of subjects to support the economic, technical, professional, educational, and social development of the entire region. The information i needed already existed in English language books, but to translate everything that would have been usefull would alone have proved an insurmountable task, and,,

LITERARY PROPERTY IN THE

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21

even if that were possible, to print it subsequently in Chinese would have been prohibitively expensive. It appeared much simpler to reprint the English text and to let that language be the medium for information transfer. 4. The vast difference in labor and materials costs between the United States and Taiwan. In 1949 per capita income in Taiwan was only $30 per year, whereas in New York it was $1,800. This enormous cost differential could be reflected in comparative book prices and appeared to make local reprinting the only viable method of supplying the books needed in Taiwan. Given the market, the technology, and favorable economics, China recommenced immediately following World War II to reproduce Western books as it had done before, with permission from no one. Now, however, reprinting began to be done on a much expanded scale, both in number of titles reproduced and in number of copies printed. The economics of the case were simple: with no royalty payments necessary to authors, with no design costs, editorial costs, composition costs, advertising costs—(by the time a book was reprinted on Taiwan, it had already been widely advertised by its original publisher)—without the first publisher's risk of issuing an unsalable title, without all of this necessary expenditure, a reprinter anywhere could reproduce a book at a small fraction of its initial cost. Reduced even more by the great difference in labor costs mentioned above, the actual retail sale price of a Taiwan reprint could and did run as low as 10 percent of its New York-produced prototype, even though the reprint had been made in an edition as small as 500 copies. The enormous "first copy cost" of the original publisher in getting the book issued was eliminated for the reprinter. American publishers' representatives began making their first serious explorations of the potential markets for their wares in the Orient in the early post-war years, and

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they were uniformly shaken at the discovery that many of their most marketable items were already in East Asian bookstores in counterfeit editions at a much lower price than they could have been legitimately supplied. By about 1954 most of the American houses that held exportable properties had become rather painfully aware that they were being undercut in the Orient in this way, but they were puzzled as to the best way to combat the situation. It was quite clear that the Asian purchaser simply could not afford to buy books at American export prices, so the pirating efforts were probably not cutting deep into legitimate markets, yet American publishers were reluctant to condone by inaction this expropriation of what they considered their rightful property. Since China had never agreed to any international copyright conventions, however, they could find little satisfaction in legal action. Furthermore, piracy in the Orient at that time lacked clear specificity. Far from being limited geographically to Taiwan, piracies were taking place within or without the law in Korea, the Philippines, Japan, and elsewhere, and unauthorized reprints, lacking indication of origin, were turning up in the markets of Hong Kong, Singapore, Macao, and Bangkok. In the face of such an amorphous and indefinable threat, most American publishers in the middle 1950's simply vented their frustrations during golf or cocktail party discussions—often a bit selfrighteously considering the extensive early pirating activities of some of their own firms—and did not set upon any clear course of concerted action. Furthermore, considering the quite sophisticated organizational and communications structure of the American publishing industry, there appears to have been surprisingly little consensus as to the scope or magnitude of the challenge it was facing or of how best to face up to it. Lack of a battle plan at this time, however, to a large degree resulted from the fact that a substantial majority of the member houses in the appropriate organizations were not sufficiently active in the foreign markets—especially Asian—to warrant much interest or concern from them; by far the largest stake in jeopardy be-

LITERARY

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longed to a small handful of America's biggest and strongest firms. In other words, interest and concern was not industry wide. It at first appeared that the major problem of Oriental piracy to be solved was in Japan. The United States and Japan had enjoyed reciprocal protection of literary property, except for translations which were free for the taking, through the provisions of a bilateral treaty concluded in 1905. This treaty, along with others, was abrogated by the Japanese Peace Treaty which was signed on April 28, 1952. Eighteen months later, however, on November 10, 1953, a new copyright arrangement was made between the United States and Japan reestablishing adequate protection and eliminating the earlier translation waiver. All would have gone well between the American and Japanese book industries under this new arrangement, if the Japanese had unanimously abided by it. Regrettably, however, penalties for violation were minor, and since Japanese labor costs were so very low at that time, the lure of profit in piracy was too strong for all to forego and some piracy continued to take place. McGraw-Hill soon found it necessary to bring suit against the Natural Science Study Society and Jun Mori, both of Tokyo, for pirating some of its technical books. A short time later Wiley and others found that several of their titles were being marketed to Tokyo in unauthorized reprints, but because of the successful prosecution in the earlier McGraw-Hill case, they were able to resolve the cases to their satisfaction without having to resort to legal action. T h e Tokyo pirate of the Wiley books, Susumu Y a m a m o t o of Bunkensha, allegedly reproduced fully twentyfour American technical books before an out-of-court agreement was reached on July 26, 1955. Under the agreement Mr. Y a m a m o t o apologized to each of the damaged publishers; printed a statement in leading Tokyo newspapers stating that his piracies had been illegal, unethical, and damaging to international good will; said he would desist from all future pirating;

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BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

supplied to the Japanese Ministry of Education a complete description of his operation; destroyed his plates; and was placed under bond. The story of Bunkensha's disastrous experience in the case was so widely publicized that prospective recruits to the Japanese piracy industry were thereafter thoroughly discouraged from succumbing to their temptations, and the illegal reprinting there of Western books was much reduced. There appears also to have been a pirated translation of James T. Farrell's Young Lonigan published in Tokyo in 1955, and somewhat later still 30,000 unauthorized, Tokyoprinted copies of Ben Hogan's Modern Fundamentals of Golf were confiscated from the Toyo Shobo Company in a police action instituted on a complaint by Charles E. Tuttle. Japan joined the Universal Copyright Convention in 1956, however, and two years later the Japanese Diet passed an amendment to the nation's copyright law increasing the penalty for piracy from a previous fine of 2,000 yen (U.S. $5.10) to a new two years of imprisonment and a fine of 50,000 yen. With these added penalties in a basically strong copyright law, Japanese piracy practically ended, although sporadic incidents do on occasion still occur there. Important also in the resolution of the piracy problem in Japan was the establishment of so-called Far East or Asian editions by several American publishers whose works are needed in the Orient. These editions are simply authorized reprints, made in Japan for marketing in the Orient at from one-third to one-half of the United States price. This lower price, plus Japan's rapidly rising economy, plus the fact that prospective former pirates were now being kept busy making authorized reprints, tended to reduce materially the temptation to continue piracy in Japan. As the piracy problem in Japan began to resolve itself in the latter 1950's, the attention and concern of the American industry turned more and more often to the unauthorized reprinting being done on Taiwan. Certainly it increased at a very rapid rate between 1954 and 1958, and United States

LITERARY PROPERTY IN THE

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25

publishers began wondering if they could not find protection in Chinese law similar to what they were now coming to enjoy under Japanese law. As they reviewed the legal status of property and protection in China, however, they found to their disadvantage a situation much less clear and simple. As early as the turn of the century China had been much concerned and interested in the information and knowledge—in contradistinction to printed text—that it could gain from Western sources. This fact is indicated by the text of the Treaty of Friendship, Commerce, and Navigation, concluded between the United States and China at Shanghai on October 8, 1903. Since English reading ability in China was very limited at that time, and since reproduction by photo-offset was not yet known, the treaty did not deal with reprinting as such. However, the growing need for the interchange of knowledge between the two nations prompted a very specific and important inclusion in the treaty concerning translation rights. Article XI of the treaty reads in part as follows (italics added): Therefore the Government of China . . . , now agrees to give full protection, in the same way . . . . to all citizens of the United States who are authors, designers or proprietors of any book, map, print or engraving especially prepared for the use and education of the Chinese people, or translation into Chinese of any book, in the exclusive right to print and sell such book, map, print, engraving or translation in the Empire of China during ten years from the date of registration. With the exception of the books, maps etc. specified above, which may not be reprinted in the same form, no work shall be entitled to copyright privileges under this article . . . It is understood that Chinese subjects shall be at liberty to make, print and sell original translations into Chinese of any works written or of maps compiled by a citizen of the United States.

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One is tempted now to wonder by what authority the United States Government concluded this treaty which in effect gave away property, (e.g., translation rights), which are elsewhere in United States law guaranteed to its own citizens. Nonetheless, subsequent treaty negotiations between the United States and China have not altered the sense and outworking of these important paragraphs. Translations of the works of American citizens may still be made and published in China under the provisions of this treaty with permission from no one. Interestingly, there is fairly widespread ignorance on both sides of the Pacific of the provisions in this treaty that allow for freedom to translate and publish. The U.S. Foreign Operations Administration's Mission to China recognized as early as 1954 that developmental books were badly needed for that nation's recovery, and it sought advice from Washington as to how best the translation rights to some needed books might be purchased from American publishers. Since, the Mission pointed out, "Textbook publication in Taiwan is not. generally speaking, a money-making proposition as we are accustomed to think of it," the payment of royalties for translation rights could easily price the needed books right out of the market. It requested help in getting translation rights to four American technical books which it proposed be used to establish a pattern that could be used on other books and by other Missions having similar needs. After some soul-searching and negotiation it was decided that translation rights would be obtained through Franklin Publications, Inc., at a cost of 30 cents per page, which in the case of the four trial books totaled $786.90. The terms were settled upon although the problem was clearly recognized that 30 cents per page would increase the retail price of unsubsidized finished books by very nearly 25 percent, which was a substantial deterrent to sale. Nonetheless, these and other subsidized translations were subsequently arranged for by Franklin Publications and published in Taiwan. Occasional direct contacts were also made for translation rights of books, pamphlets, and articles,

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and payments have been made for them. Professors in Chinese universities today sometimes pay to American houses $25 to $50 for permission to translate a work to be duplicated and used by their students. No payment, however, has truly been necessary since the Treaty of 1904, and concurrent with the payment for rights out of ignorance of the provision by some has been the free translation and use of American books by others. Clearly the situation as regards translation rights has been much confused and misunderstood. So much for translation. What was the legal status of simple reprinting? China promulgated a reasonably comprehensive and, in many respects, adequate copyright law on May 14, 1928. It was subsequently revised in 1944, 1949, and 1964. Among its several provisions were protection of a duly registered work for the lifetime of the author plus thirty years, penalties for copyright infringement, and assignment to the Ministry of Interior of responsibility for enforcement. Conspicuously absent in Chinese copyright law was reference to international protection, but Article IX of a new bilateral Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation between the United States and the Republic of China signed at Nanking on November 4, 1946, provided that (italics a d d e d ) : The nationals, corporations and associations of either High Contracting Party shall be accorded throughout the territory of the other High Contracting Party effective protection in enjoyment of rights with respect to their literary and artistic works, upon compliance with the applicable laws and regulations, if any, respecting registration and other formalities which are or may hereafter be enforced by the duly constituted authorities; unauthorized reproduction, sale, diffusion, and use of such literary and artistic works shall be prohibited, and effective remedy therefore shall be provided by civil action . . . There was long some doubt as to the entitlement of works by United States authors to Chinese copyright protection at all, and confusion in the matter existed for perhaps a

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dozen years. The Regulations for the Enforcement of the Copyright Law of the Republic of China, also promulgated originally in 1928, were revised in 1944, 1955, 1959, and then finally a fourth time in 1965. Two pertinent changes were made under the third revision, however, which eliminated any doubt concerning the rights of American authors and publishers to register their works in Taiwan, and gave local authorities a basis for action in cases of infraction. Thus reciprocal copyright protection between the United States and China has probably been available for four decades and has unquestionably been in force for one. This would seem to imply that elimination of book piracy in Taiwan is simply a matter of stricter law enforcement on the island, but such is not the case. Americans indeed can obtain protection in the Republic of China, but only—as the treaty requires—upon due registration of their works. Many American publishers have felt that procedures for registration for copyright in Taiwan have been inordinately complex and that the costs of doing so have been unnecessarily high. Much of the impasse in negotiations between the book industries of the two countries since 1959 could have been eliminated if agreement had been found on this key issue of registration.

3

A Lick and a Promise: First Attempts at Resolution

Consistent with the level of the entire economy, the costs of obtaining a university education in Taiwan in the mid-1950's were incredibly low. National Taiwan University, the leading higher education institution in Free China, estimated in 1955 that the average education costs of one of its students for ten months were as follows (calculated in New Taiwan dollars ) : Food (at $110 per month) Dormitory room (at $50 per semester) Tuition (none) Laboratory fees (average $10 per course) Lesson materials (books, stationery, etc) Athletic fees (at $8 per semester) Miscellaneous fees (at $20 per semester)

N.T. $1,100 100 60 80 16 40 N.T. $1,396

At the official exchange rate at that time of N.T. $24.78 to U.S $1.00, this totals an almost unbelievable U.S. $56.00 per academic year including living costs! If American books were to be got into the hands of Chinese students, they had somehow to be priced in accord with this economic level, a kind of marketing legerdemain bordering on the impossible. When American publishers first began to learn of the low purchasing power of the average Chinese student, many of them bluntly expressed their disbelief. They could picture no way of making books legitimately available so cheaply. Even their Far East editions being produced in Japan, priced as they were at perhaps 40 percent of the New York price, were far beyond the reach of such a low income level. Furthermore, American houses were hardly tempted to go

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through elaborate authorization proceedings for 1,000-copy reprintings of a book that would sell in Taiwan for $1.00 U.S., bringing back to them under a 10 percent royalty a meager $100; it cost them more than that in overhead simply to administer such an account. In short they did not know quite what to do; so many of them, under the guise of corporate magnanimity, simply looked the other way and tolerated the piracy which they knew was taking place. Early in the decade of the 1950's most American publishers who learned of a Taiwan piracy of one of their books either—out of a combined sense of comparative unconcern, futility, and frustration—took no action at all or else vented their feelings in complaints to the Department of State. Not surprisingly, considering both the international political climate and American popular attitudes of the era, these complaints frequently assumed the tone of: " A f t e r all that the United States is doing for China these days, how can these pirates even think of treating our property in so reprehensible a way?" a question hardly able of itself to contribute to any kind of amicable éclaircissement. The Department of State faithfully and methodically checked out through its Embassy in Taipei each such complaint with the appropriate officials of the Government of the Republic of China ( G R C ) . It was uniformly told, however, that since American publishers had in practically no cases registered their books in Taiwan, they had no legal ground for complaint. The G R C willingly offered to move, under the law, against any reprinter where the title in question had been duly registered by the copyright owner. On December 17, 1954, the Office of Economic Defense and Trade Policy of the Department of State advised the American Book Publishers Council of the requirements of Chinese law for copyright protection. Registration was to be made with the Ministry of Interior ( M O I ) in Taipei; it need not be made simultaneous with registration in the United States as was required by certain other conventions; a letter of authority

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f r o m the copyright owner had to be attached to the application if it was to be submitted through an agent; the application needed to be in a prescribed format although printed forms were not available; two copies of the book should accompany the application; and the cost of the registration was twenty-five times the sale price of the publication. Barring fulfillment of these requirements, injured American publishers had no legal recourse. O n F e b r u a r y 14, 1955, the American Book Publishers Council ( A B P C ) communicated these requirements to the m e m b e r s of its Copyright Committee and to its Joint Foreign T r a d e Committee, joint, that is, with the American Textbook Publishers Institute. It also requested the U.S. Copyright Office and the D e p a r t m e n t of State "to take such action as may be appropriate to remedy this highly unsatisfactory situation," although in hindsight it is a little difficult to envision just what the Council would have considered appropriate action by those agencies. American dissatisfaction with Chinese requirements concentrated u p o n — a l t h o u g h it was not limited t o — t h e need to pay twenty-five times the sale price of the publication. Being in the practicc of paying only $ 4 . 0 0 to register a book with the U.S. Copyright Office, thereby guaranteeing protection in the whole American market, New York publishers could not u n d e r s t a n d the need to pay sixty times as much to register the same $ 1 0 book in Taipei, where at best they could probably not sell m o r e than a dozen copies at Western prices anyway. It was not possible economically to justify registering under these conditions. M a n y felt that, since American books were necessarily often among the highest priced in the world, this fee was intentionally discriminatory in effect to keep registration of American b o o k s with the M O I to a minimum so that they could be freely reprinted locally and purveyed at rock-bottom prices to China's growing masses of university students. A m e r i c a n publishers may have been partially justified in their suspicions, but it must also be pointed out that

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the American industry did not clearly understand that there is in the Chinese concept of registration a basic function—doubtless its most costly function—which is completely alien to American thinking in the matter. Registration in China does more than simply protect the rights in the book; it also enables government censors to give it a careful examination and to assure that it contains nothing subversive or injurious to what they feel are the best interests of the Republic of China. Although Americans find this notion somewhat repugnant, it must in fairness be recalled that historically one of the original functions of Western copyright tradition was also to record the Church/State imprimatur of approbation, and that the Republic of China is still a nation technically engaged in an important civil war. A substantial portion of the fee exacted by the MOI was to pay for examination of the book by official readers before its production in China was even to be allowed. There is no question but that almost everyone in China was afraid—and indeed still is, to a degree—of what would happen if it were made too easy for Americans to register their books there. American technical and scientific knowledge was and is absolutely essential to the continuing economic, educational, and social growth of the Republic, and this knowledge can in no better way be disseminated than through her many fine texts and reference books. Chinese government officials, educators, students—indeed the "man on the street" —have recognized with near terror that, if all American books were registered with the MOI, there would be nothing remaining to prevent American publishers, if they so chose, from refusing to authorize any local reprinting at all, thereby forcing the Chinese to pay New York import prices, or at least the prices of authorized Japanese reprints. If this were to happen, China's national growth would simply grind to a halt, because that level of purchasing power did not and does not exist there. It must be admitted that few American publishers, officially or informally, gave the Chinese reassurance in the 1950's that they had any clear under-

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standing of this problem so crucial to China's national survival and growth, or really that they were even concerned about it. Indeed, as was stated earlier, their apparent belief that, since the Republic was receiving United States economic assistance, the Department of State should simply be able to tell the recipients to desist from action whence American firms could not profit, only fortified the Chinese in their apprehension that attempts to negotiate with New York houses for authorization to reprint would be fruitless. From the viewpoint of the American publishers, on the other hand, the Chinese fear that reprinting would not be authorized if foreign protection were available, had all the appearance of an intentionally constructed "straw man," and again their suspicions may have been partially warranted. Americans generally were in no way so unconscionably calloused to the needs of poor Asian students; they had proved that by working out satisfactory Far East editions of their books in Japan. Instead, therefore, of seeing patriotic concern for national development in the actions of the Taiwan book industry, American houses saw bare-faced and impudent thievery of their properties and total and irresponsible unconcern for international good will and basic standards of acceptable ethical and moral behavior. In the face of two such diametrically conflicting views, it is probably no wonder that mutual distrust grew rapidly, with most American houses looking upon the Taiwan industry as a lair of unprincipled pirates, and much of Taiwan looking upon American publishers as robber-barons anxious to preserve incredibly high profits regardless of the fate of their troubled nation. There were few, if any, serious efforts to understand one another's positions, and as a result negotiations between the two book industries remained practically nonexistent. Piracy therefore increased during the period. Whereas it had earlier been to a large degree a "passive" industry—e.g., printers waiting for professors to come in and request that specific titles be reprinted—it now became more dynamic, with printers actually carrying American editions of newly ap-

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pearing texts to the universities and attempting to sell professors the idea of switching to them in subsequent semesters. It was not unknown for considerable pressure to be brought to bear upon professors with large classes in the basic disciplines to get them to adopt new books. It is doubtful that—as has been known to happen in some countries—there ever developed in Taiwan a "market rate" at which professors adopted, such as "for ten percent of the retail value" of the editions. Such devices have never been quite as effective with university professors as they have with such other groups as school boards, civil servants, principals. Yet many printers maintained their shops around the universities, and they knew the professors well. Since it was as fitting and polite in the East as it was in the West for friends to exchange favors, it has been common practice when a professor adopts a new book for its printer out of gratitude and friendship to send him an appropriate gift, or at least to entertain him at dinner. And the Chinese entertain splendidly at dinner! Aggressive selling therefore did and does take place, but flagrant bribery has been rare. Again the economics of the situation have prevented substantial kickbacks of any kind without pricing a prospective new reprint out of the market. Of course, sometimes the prestige value to a Taiwan house of having its book adopted is worth more than money, and it is said that some years ago one Chinese publisher distributed largesse amounting to no less than N.T. $30,000 among key individuals to get higher educative institutions to adopt Linus Pauling's General Chemistry. He was successful and the book is still widely used. It is doubtful that the publisher has as yet recovered—or indeed ever planned fully to recover—his capital investment in the adoption. Since much of Taiwan's reprinting is done almost on a "cottage industry" basis, however, fewer than three or four houses have had the financial resources to engage in such activities for the sake of prestige. By the mid-1950's there were several hundred English language books in print in pirated editions in Taiwan, most of which had been rather passively produced in response to specific and spontaneous needs arising out of the universities.

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Many of these books had been printed on old, semidilapidated offset presses in sheds or cellars by hard-working but unknowledgeable craftsmen with the help of their wives and children in editions of a few hundred copies only. Some of the wealthier firms, however, were coming to see that, properly tapped, important book markets could be found that could produce substantial profits. Some of these firms did their own printing, while others bought their printing from the small family shops. All began swelling their offerings for sale by exchanging stocks with their competitors in much the same fashion as was done by the early American printer-booksellers. Instead, however, of developing from booksellers into true publishers as has happened in most other countries, Taiwan English-language booksellers uniformly grew into reprinters only. Few developed the competence or expertise to do original publishing, and very few printers have ever had English-language composition ability. Many of the printers themselves do not even read English. The two fastest growing and most vigorous booksellers in the Republic of China during the period from 1954 to 1958 were the Southeast Book Company on Po Ai Road in the heart of Old Taipei, and the Tung Ya Book Company, (variously translated as Far East, Far Eastern, and East Asiatic) near the campus of National Taiwan University on Roosevelt Road. This latter firm, which shall hereafter be called Far East, has also called itself on occasion the A B C Store (for American Book C o m p a n y ) . Headed by a man named Hsu Yung-Fa, F a r East had long been an active reprinter with greater alleged unconcern for matters involved with authorization and copyright than any other major Formosan firm. It proceeded throughout the period to reproduce literally hundreds of America's best technical books and appears seldom, if ever, to have attempted negotiating with the original publisher for rights. In fact, Far East in 1958 issued a catalogue that not only listed for sale fully ninety unauthorized reprints of McGraw-Hill's most salable titles but also actually had the

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temerity to display prominently on the catalogue's cover a picture of the impressive McGraw-Hill headquarters building on West Forty-Second Street in New York! Surely here was insult piled upon injury, an act which must have been calculated to announce to the world at large that Far East knew it was secure in the law and that it planned to pirate as long and as far as developing circumstances would permit. Subsequent events in this firm, about which more will be said later, appear to have supported this impression. Southeast Book Company, however—larger and wealthier than Far East and just as vigorous—has never wholly abandoned its conscience in the matter of piracies, although it has through the years placed some substantial strains and rationalizations upon it. Directed by a man with enviable business acumen, one Choh Chin-Shin, Southeast has long been an important power in the Taiwan reprint business. Aiding Mr. Choh has been his charming and competent young wife, Liu Ching-Ti, who has been characterized facetiously as the "Dragon Lady" in the whole pirating industry. She uses the name Lucy Liu and has been proprietress of the Lucy Book Store and the New Moon Book Company. Southeast Book Company has wished that it could thrive with a three-pronged legitimate operation: (1) as a retail bookstore; ( 2 ) as an authorized reprinter of American books; and ( 3 ) as a book importer. In competition, however, with the kind of flagrant piracy that was legally permissible in Taiwan at the time, such a lily-white operation was obviously destined to certain failure, and Mr. Choh was too dynamic a businessman to accept failure lightly. Although he could have wished for the illegalization of piracy, it did not happen, and so Mr. Choh maintained his competitive position by developing also the New Moon Book Company in the name of his wife, Lucy Liu. New Moon is today the largest unauthorized reprinter of English language books in the Republic, maintaining currently more than 1,200 such tides in print! Most of the American publishers' early concern with Taiwan reprinting centered upon the Far East Book Com-

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pany and the Southeast Book Company. The former remained a shadowy kind of operation in American eyes, with Mr. Hsu never really taking corporeal form; Far East was simply thought of impersonally as a source of pirated reprints. Southeast, on the other hand, presented two identifiable personalities in Choh Chin-Shin and Liu Ching-Ti, and there were some early efforts at negotiation between that house and several American firms. Moreover, a fair number of American firms had come to know Southeast as Taiwan's leading book importer at that time. In the mid-1950's Southeast was perhaps importing more books than all of the other firms in Taiwan together, their invoices running on occasion as high as N.T. $20,000 per month. The Department of State meanwhile, under continuing pressure from the American industry, was apparently beginning to make some progress at rendering the Taiwan situation more palatable to American tastes. Following representations from the Embassy in Taipei, the Government of the Republic of China found that it could still clear costs of book registration if it charged a fee amounting only to ten times the price of a book (five times for a textbook) instead of the previously exorbitant twenty-five times, and the amount was accordingly reduced. Embassy officials also talked informally with several of the leading Taipei booksellers and found that they would welcome opportunity to negotiate with American copyright owners for authorization to reprint in Taiwan. By the summer of 1957 it had become the consensus of United States government officials concerned that the best course of action for the American industry with regard to Taiwan reprints would be as follows: 1. American publishers should register all old and new titles which they felt would be subject to piracy. 2. They should maintain local vigilance to detect cases of piracy of registered books. 3. A few prominent test cases of illegal reproduction and sale of books should be taken to court. 4. Embassy assistance should be made available to Ameri-

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can publishers who felt they had through piracy.

IN

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injury

State Department officials, moreover, felt strongly that American houses should consider authorizing reliable local publishers to reproduce inexpensive editions of their most marketable titles, thereby rendering piracy less attractive. During this period the American industry was coming increasingly to share the State Department view that it should register its best titles and authorize local reprints. In part this decision was prompted by recognition that it could not sell in Taiwan at U.S. prices, and that some royalty income was better than none. This consideration, however, remained relatively unappealing because—as was mentioned earlier—the overhead cost of administering an authorization frequently ran to a larger amount than could be expected back in royalties on a small edition of a low-priced book. Moreover, no one could really predict what books were most subject to piracy. For truly adequate protection an American house would have to register its entire lists, but the cost of such large-scale registration would be prohibitive. Looming as a much more important consideration to the American industry was the fear that piracy would spread to other countries. Korea also had low labor costs and a growing need for American technical knowledge, as did India, Iran, and other nations. If such other countries were to observe the Taiwan industry pirating with impunity, the temptation in view of their own nations' developmental book needs would be great to do likewise. If this were to happen, the entire foundation of international protection of literary rights upon which had been built the book export activities of the world's largest publishers would crumble, and this vast structure would collapse. They felt for this reason great urgency to bring the Taiwan industry into line with the internationally accepted pattern of legitimate publishing. There was therefore a bit of a feeling that American houses had better "authorize at any cost,"

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RESOLUTION

39

although they bridled s o m e w h a t at the t h o u g h t that this w a s the only viable course of action remaining o p e n to them. In late 1 9 5 7 , at any rate, H e a t h . Wiley, A d d i son-Wesley, G i n n , a n d F r e e m a n registered a total of eight titles with the Ministry of Interior in T a i p e i a n d simultaneously authorized their local reprinting. All eight of these a u t h o r i z a t i o n s were m a d e to M r . C h o h of Southeast B o o k C o m p a n y , w h o immediately took steps to protect his newly a c q u i r e d p r o p e r t y . T h r o u g h advertising their new status, discussion with school and educational authorities, a n d the threat of legal action, he m a d e m u c h of the industry in both countries for the first time a w a r e that protection of a u t h o r i z e d reprints could be thus gained. M o s t if not all of the titles authorized to S o u t h east h a d already been pirated in T a i w a n , a n d their first r e p r i n ters were caught with substantial stocks of the u n a u t h o r i z e d printings still on their h a n d s . Realizing that they could no longer sell these b o o k s without risking legal action, several pirates disposed of them at wholesale to M r . C h o h , w h o "legitimized" t h e m by paying royalty o n t h e m , and then sold t h e m b a c k at a higher price to be retailed as authorized editions, again at a price sufficiently a d v a n c e d to cover the royalty cost. It was beginning to a p p e a r as though a new e r a h a d arrived in which the T a i w a n b o o k industry could work at h a r m o n y and f o r m u t u a l gain with those in the rest of the world.

«M2

4

EB and the Gathering Storm

Regrettably, the promise for the reconciliation of the piracy problem that seemed to exist in these early authorizations has not yet been fulfilled. Within a year of their negotiation it had begun to become apparent to the American firms involved that, rather than improving as had been expected, the situation had deteriorated rather badly. The number of American titles appearing in counterfeit in the Taiwan markets was increasing by leaps and bounds, so that by mid-1959 the number of Western titles that had been reprinted there numbered more than two thousand. The plight of the large American firms with substantial lists of exportable titles was typified by Wiley. Although during 1957 and 1958 Wiley had authorized the reprinting in Taipei of five of its best books and had duly received royalty payments for them, the 1958 combined catalogue of Taiwan reprints contained fully sixty Wiley titles, the other fifty-five being pirated editions. The catalogue also listed more than one hundred McGraw-Hill titles, only a handful of which had been authorized. Other firms were experiencing the same rapid disillusionment. It had also been hoped by the American industry that the availability of low-priced authorized Japanese reprints of its most-needed technical books—the so-called Far Eastern or Asian editions—would tend to reduce the temptations for the Formosans to pirate, but there was disappointment on this score as well. At that time McGraw-Hill and Wiley together had produced about 80 percent of the authorized Japanese reprints. Yet on May 11, 1959, Frank Forkert of Wiley's Overseas Division could report that even though his firm's Asian editions

EB AND THE GATHERING

STORM

41

could be supplied at one-third of the American price, it had received no orders for them from the booksellers of Taiwan. The reason, of course, was that, even at that low price, Taiwan booksellers could make more profit by doing their own reprinting and not paying royalties. Furthermore, there was still enough anti-Japanese feeling remaining in Taiwan from the days of occupation to reduce materially the potential sale there of any Japanese product. When in mid-1959 McGraw-Hill solicited Taipei orders from its list of authorized Japanese reprints, one bookseller replied as follows: We have carefully reviewed your list of McGraw-Hill Asian editions. We are naturally interested in it, for many of these titles are used by colleges here as textbooks, and the sales are indeed considerable every year. However, all but two of them, Stephenson's Introduction to Nuclear Engineering and McAdams's Heat Transmission have been pirated locally. Instead of one-third the New York price, Taiwan reprints were going in the Taipei bookstores at about 15 percent of the New York price. How indeed could the industry in the United States wage war against such an enemy? American firms at the time were coming to recognize more and more of the names and sometimes even the faces of that enemy. Southeast Book Company, operating under various names but primarily as New Moon, continued increasing its lists of piracies very rapidly, as did Far East. The Central Book Company on Chungking Road South in Taipei was being well guided in its expanding piracies by a very able former military man named T. K. Lin. Tan Chiang Book Company, two doors north of Central, had originally published on the China Mainland and was being competently managed by its proprietor, Chiu Ju-Shen. Eurasia Book Company, headed by Liao Chin-Chin, the only native-born Taiwanese in the book industry on the island, was located across the street from the

42

BOOK PIRATING

IN

TAIWAN

National Taiwan University campus, an advantage which the pleasant and jovial Mr. Liao used ably to build what is today the second longest list of English language reprints in the Republic of China. One of the most colorful personalities whom the Americans were coming to know, however was Sun Kuo-Jen, proprietor of the Rainbow-Bridge Book Company in the center of the city. Originally from the North China Mainland and a former customs official, Mr. Sun had first entered the trade in Taipei as a book importer and had begun reprinting in 1957. He had in that year successfully sought the first Taiwan authorization to reprint an American title when he bought permission from Prentice-Hall to produce Hayden's Mastering American English. H e subsequently obtained several other authorizations. The highly individualistic Mr. Sun has restricted his lists almost entirely to books in language learning and in philosophy, and he claims that he has never reprinted a Western book without first requesting authorization to do so; he candidly admits, however, that he then reprints the book whether or not he receives an affirmative reply to his request. The very explosive situation in Taipei was blown wide open in early June 1959 with the pirating of the entire twenty-four volume Encyclopedia Britannica. Suddenly there it was, adequately reprinted and available to anyone in Taiwan at a price ridiculously lower than the $350 it normally bought in the Western world. Although the new pirated edition was listed at about $100 U.S., the competition to move it was great, and the price tumbled readily to the point where almost anyone could obtain a complete set anywhere—in bookstores, from street peddlers, bellhops, etc.—for as little as $55 U.S. The Encyclopedia Britannica was first reprinted by one Hsiao Meng-Kung of the Book World Company in downtown Taipei in an edition of 1,500 copies. It was reprinted again, however, almost immediately by Mr. Choh of Southeast in another edition, this time of 2,500 copies. The fact that there were two competing reprints of the EB brought the price even

EB

AND THE

GATHERING

43

STORM

lower in the b o o k s t o r e s , so that on o c c a s i o n it c o u l d b e had for no m o r e than $ 4 5 U . S . Actually

it had been generally

known

T a i p e i trade fully two m o n t h s earlier that the EB

in

the

was going to

be pirated, and the w o r d h a d got b a c k to the original publisher. H e r e , it was felt, was a c h a l l e n g e that c o u l d not g o unmet, and an attorney, M r . L i T s e - M i n , was retained in T a i p e i to t a k e appropriate legal action. M r . Li immediately filed with the M O I f o r registration

o f the original

Western

edition—despite

the

substantial fee of ten times the A m e r i c a n p r i c e — a n d began in A p r i l to warn the T a i p e i b o o k s e l l e r s that they would b e h a n dling pirated c o p i e s at their peril, since they could b e c a u g h t holding large stocks o f the expensive p i r a c y which would b e s u b j e c t to confiscation as soon as registration p r o c e d u r e s w e r e complete. M o s t b o o k s e l l e r s at first played a cautious, waitand-see g a m e with respect to the EB, but when the piracy

finally

appeared near the first o f J u n e 1 9 5 9 and registration p r o c e e d ings had still not b e e n c o m p l e t e d on the W e s t e r n edition, all restraints were b r o k e n . L i t e r a l l y all b o o k s t o r e s m o v e d i m m e d i a t e l y with the sale o f the c o u n t e r f e i t . T h e w o r k

ahead sold

e x t r e m e l y well, and despite frantic a n n o u n c e m e n t s b y M r . L i o n J u n e 13 that h e was filing lawsuits against certain o f the principals in the m a t t e r , such a c t i o n was never t a k e n . T h e M i n i s t r y o f Interior gave every a p p e a r a n c e o f dragging its feet in the m a t t e r o f registration f o r the EB,

and

it m a y well have been doing just that. C e r t a i n l y it was c a u g h t between two strong conflicting pressures. T h e A m e r i c a n

Em-

bassy was pushing the G o v e r n m e n t o f the R e p u b l i c o f C h i n a very h a r d to c o m p l e t e the registration as rapidly as possible so that legal action could b e taken against the pirates. D o u b t l e s s , however,

counterpressures

o f a less readily

identifiable

and

m u c h m o r e insidious n a t u r e were also being b r o u g h t to b e a r upon the M O I to deny the r e q u e s t e d registration. T h e r e w e r e , however, real legal and c e n s o r s h i p issues at stake in the m a t t e r which were troubling the M O I . T h e

44

BOOK PIRATING

IN

TAIWAN

Central Daily News of Taipei issued a release on June 14, 1959, defining these issues, and predicting that: the American publishing company would encounter considerable difficulty in the procedure for registration of the copyright for the Encyclopedia Britannica, arising as a sequel to the incorrect information contained therein concerning the Republic of China. For instance, the encyclopedia erroneously describes Outer Mongolia as an independent state and opium-smoking as a popular custom or habit among the Chinese. The Encyclopedia also renders incorrect information on Mao Tse-Tung. The Taipei reprinters had wisely stripped in appropriate alterations of the text at these points and had, in fact, in many places simply left whole pages of their edition blank rather than risk offending the censor's sensitivities on such matters. The Central Daily News release continued: A school of opinion in legal circles here also expressed doubts as to whether the American publishing company's application for registration should be granted. They pointed out that Article 1 of the Enforcement Regulations of the Copyright Law stipulate that a publication which has been in circulation for more than 20 years without registration shall not be permitted to apply for registration under the law. Article 10 further prescribes that "for publications issued by foreigners but specifically designed for the use of Chinese, the said foreigners may apply for registration with the Chinese government under this law. The foreigners referred to above are restricted to those whose governments recognize the same right for Chinese people in their respective countries." The Encyclopedia Britannica was published more than 20 years ago and was not designed exclusively for the use of Chinese. Furthermore there are also many cases of Americans publishing Chinese books. They pointed out specifi-

EB AND THE GATHERING

STORM

45

cally that the University of Stanford had reprinted Chinese books. Thus the MOI had problems to resolve beyond the simple issuing of the registration, and the case began to take on some of the appearance of a cause célèbre. The reprinter, of course, protested his innocence of wrongdoing, claiming that his reprinting was not prompted by profitmaking motives, but by an urge to make some sort of contribution to the cultural development in his nation. This, he claimed, was witnessed by the fact that the selling price of the reprint barely covered the cost of printing. A large number of persons of learning were thus being enabled for the first time to purchase a set of encyclopedias, he said. Although the majority of the population of Taiwan that considered the matter at all was doubtless in favor of continued piracy because of the critical importance to China of low-priced books, there was by no means unanimity on the matter. One of the most influential voices favoring sound protection at this time was that of the widely respected scholar Dr. Hu Shih, President of China's oldest institution of learning, the Academia Sinica. On June 24, Dr. Hu issued a widely promulgated public statement calling upon the legislative Yuan, China's parliamentary body, to enact a law to protect the rights of authors and claiming that piracy was immoral. He pointed out that piracy, even of Chinese books themselves, was common because punishment provided under the existing law was so slight. Dr. Hu, as an author, had on occasion suffered personally when his own works had been reprinted by pirates. All interested eyes were watching the case of the pirated encyclopedia, because it was clear that the outcome would most likely determine the future course of the Taiwan reprint industry. Meanwhile copies of the pirated EB continued to sell, and sell, and sell. Full-page advertisements announcing the Britannica bargain appeared in both of Taipei's Englishlanguage daily newspapers, one explaining to the reader that

46

BOOK

PIRATING

IN

TAIWAN

"if you subscribe now, you will also receive free of charge o n e original copy of the Webster's New World Dictionary or American College Dictionary." One Taipei bookseller, himself of n e cessity a pirate although in favor of a statute outlawing it, wrote on June 24 to McGraw-Hill: You must have read all about the legal battle now being waged here between the publishers of The Encyclopedia Britannica and two bookstores who are selling pirated editions of the E B for something like $45. We regret to saythat the outcome of the court fight remains very much in doubt, as the E B representative here has but a weak organization and does not even know what to do to stop at least the street sales pending court decision. Already 1,500 sets have been sold, and by the time the court reaches a decision there will be nothing left to impound. Throughout the proceedings, as one would expect, there were recurrent rumors that the American Embassy was taking steps to have the bogus edition impounded, but they were uniformly denied. There was no legal ground on which such action could be taken, of course, and the rumors were interpreted in some quarters simply as manifestations of guilt feelings among the pirates. It is perhaps more likely that they were prompted by the fact that in the Asian mind this is exactly what an offended strong nation would be expected to d o an offending weak one, law or no law. After equivocating on the issue for some time, the Ministry of Interior finally convened a conference in the first week in July 1959 at which representatives of the Foreign Ministry and the Ministries of Education and Justice studied "problems" relating to the application for registration by the American publishers of EB. T h e problems recognized and discussed were primarily threefold: 1. the bad worldwide publicity resulting from the case; 2. that fact that the American edition did actually contain

EB AND T H E

GATHERING

STORM

47

matter and wording concerning the Chinese political scene that could not by current standards be approved by the censors; 3. China's continuing need for good technical information at low prices. Doubtless lurking in the backs of some of the leading minds pondering the problem were the substantial profits being gleaned from the sale of the EB. The reprinters would have seen to that. The publicity on the case, furthermore, was undeniably good for business, and one can be sure that the profiting companies brought as many pressures upon the conferees and others in the power structure as they could muster to get the case resolved in their favor, or at least to have action delayed until they could unload their remaining stocks of the encyclopedia. Understandably this last consideration was not publicly discussed and remains unrecorded in the minutes of the sessions. The meeting was an agonizing one, but with results which were at long last satisfying to the American publishers. Registration was finally granted to the Encyclopedia Britannica, but in announcing its decision, the Ministry urged that "certain corrections" be made in the text of future editions. At any rate, the great EB was now copyrighted in the Republic of China, making sale of the two pirated editions illegal, although not until after several thousand copies of the local reprints had been sold. The delay in the decision was just long enough so that almost the entire stocks of the reprint were got rid of before they were illegalized. The success of the EB case, of course, prompted the publishers of other American reference texts for the first time to seek registration in China. Proprietors of such works as the thirty-volume Encyclopedia Americana and Webster's Collegiate Dictionary—long available in Taipei for a little more than $1.00—filed with the M O I for similar protection. Some received it while others did not, primarily because of too frequent "inaccuracies" in their texts to allow for censorship ap-

48

BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

proval. Thus the latest edition of Collier's Encyclopedia could be purchased in Taiwan promptly after its appearance in the United States and still is available. Its list price today is N.T. $4,000, which at current exchange rates is $100 U.S., but it may actually be purchased in any store in Taipei for $55. Collier's Encyclopedia, interestingly enough, is today printed by a small firm which is one of the "fronts" of the Southeast Book Company. It is said that the Southeast Book Company cleared more than N.T. $1 million profit on the Encyclopadia Britannica, turned around, and immediately sunk it all and more into the unauthorized reprinting of literally hundreds of additional Western tides. Thus Mr. Choh alone, in his several interests, soon controlled literally two thousand titles, many in editions which were quite large by Chinese standards. Mr. Choh realized full well that even the growing Chinese market could not absorb this new surfeit of English works, but he and his competitors were beginning to see new markets. There was a vast English-reading public all over Asia, as well as elsewhere on the globe, anxious to obtain books substantially below their legitimate market prices. Exportation of Taiwan reprints had been taking place for some time prior to 1960, although it had been primarily unorganized, limited, and spotty. Western publishing interests were becoming increasingly uneasy in the later 1950's, however, as their travelers and agents began with growing frequency to come across Taiwan counterfeits of their wares in bookstores at some distances from the island. On May 11, 1959, an official of one major American house wrote as follows to the Department of State: During a recent trip through the Far East I discovered that to date these unauthorized reprints have not yet been distributed outside of Formosa except to Hong Kong. There, at the University of Hong Kong, the students have been buying them direcdy from Formosa as

EB AND THE GATHERING

STORM

49

a result of promotional materials sent directly to them. I was told that payment was being made to a post office box in Hong Kong. I am pursuing this matter further, and if possible will see that the post office box is closed. I was also told that promotional materials had been seen in the Philippines, though there was no evidence of this or unauthorized reprints in the Philippines. Although the writer may have been overoptimistic in his belief that exportation was limited to Hong Kong and perhaps the Philippines, he was certainly correct in his recognition of Hong Kong as the major overseas distribution point for the Taiwan pirates. The Times of London recognized the problem in an article on June 22, 1959, and quoted Mr. John Chappie, director of London's Longmans, Green and Company, as saying "The situation is very alarming, and unless it is checked it will do great harm to the legitimate British and American book trade. No rights are paid on these books at all, and it is really plain stealing." Stealing it may have been in an ethical sense, but due to the complexities of the law it was not stealing in a legal sense, and herein lay the dilemma. Men, as societies the world over, have always been more disposed to live by law than they have by ethics. Although books from many countries, including Spain, Germany, France, and elsewhere were bring reprinted in Taiwan, by far the largest number of piracies were in the English language. Because of the great American influence in the Republic of China—the extensive use of American equipment, the large number of American-trained professors and teachers, the substantial cadres of American technical advisors — a substantial majority of the English language books reprinted there have been of American origin. This majority has on occasion exceeded 85 percent. Nonetheless, the problem has been of serious, although less extensive, proportions for several English publishing firms, and concern there has frequently run high.

50

BOOK

PIRATING

IN

TAIWAN

In the first week of July 1959 the problem of Taiwan's book exports was discussed in England's House of Lords, with Viscount Elibank enquiring if Taiwan piracy could not somehow be stopped. Lord Stoneham pointed out that the British government had recently allocated more than $ 1 million U.S. to subsidize British books abroad and that this direct financial interest might make it incumbent upon the government to take as stringent action as possible to protect the public monies. The Earl of Dundee, Minister without Portfolio, replied that the House of Lords need not fear for British interests at least—that although Taiwan was not signatory to the international copyright conventions, pirated books could under law be seized if imported into British colonies. It soon became clear, however, that the problem even for British interests was not so simple. On July 25, 1959, The Bookseller published a letter to its editor from one F. W. Kendall in Hong Kong complaining that existing legislation was really not adequate to stop or even reduce the flow of books into British colonies. Mr. Kendall explained: What the Earl of Dundee fails to understand is the method by which these pirated books enter Hongkong and other cities, including London. A local agent is appointed and he receives stocks of catalogues. These are circulated to likely customers and orders are placed. The funds are remitted to Formosa by the agent and the books are then mailed by book post direct to the address of the buyer. As long as the buyer does not offer these books for resale, neither Lord Dundee nor anyone else can prosecute him or seize his books. It is important to note the author of this letter, because he was a man well qualified to speak. Mr. Kendall—a large dynamic figure with a commanding mein and a dominant disposition—has on several occasions been referred to as the "James Bond of the publishing world," and indeed, although the

EB AND T H E

GATHERING

STORM

51

epithet overdramatizes his role, it is not wholly inapt. The head of an extensive private investigative agency on Victoria Island, Hong Kong, Mr. Kendall counts among his specialties the guarding against unauthorized use in the Orient of patents, trademarks, and other registered devices. He had long been retained by several London publishers who had been concerned about the piracy that had once been taking place in the Crown Colony itself, and largely through his vigorous and effective efforts, that source of pirated books had been almost entirely dried up. At any rate, Mr. Kendall's letter to The Bookseller was drawn from years of close association with problems of Oriental book piracy and smuggling. He knew whereof he spoke; legal action against such book imports could indeed not be taken. By mid-1959 it was abundantly clear that the Taiwan book industry had been tooling up in recent months and producing, not for local markets as it had been content to do in the past, but for worldwide markets. Piracy was now being carried to the high seas, and a substantial illicit international traffic in books was beginning to make itself felt upon the world book markets, as Taiwan reprints began appearing in Singapore, Bangkok, and India. Whereas in the past, Western publishers had been rankled, frustrated, and annoyed by the pirates of Taiwan; they were now coming to be seriously alarmed by them. The worst conceivable development from the point of view of English publishers was hinted at in Mr. Kendall's letter when he wrote that Taiwan books were entering "other cities, including London." Doubtless some kind of legal action could be taken to stop the flow of low-priced reprints back into their originating countries, but what? At almost the same moment that the British were getting this warning through Mr. Kendall's letter, American firms were also for the first time being alerted to the same possible eventuality. On June 6, 1959, a source within the Taipei book trade wrote to one major American house that "orders have been rushed in from America

52

BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

for reprinted technical books and soon our dealers will export them in quantities." If this were to happen, the enemy would have assumed very different shape and proportions, and would require a very different kind of counterwarfare on the part of the protagonists.

KZI

5

Ames and Industry Response

When the storm finally broke, it did so in a most unlikely place. A sudden drop in the sale of textbooks at Iowa State University in Ames in February 1960 prompted Wiley to seek the reason, and it found that Chinese reprints were being made available there in quantity. Wiley's resident traveler in Ames, Mr. Paul Lee, reported by telephone on February 16, 1960, that the campus had somehow been flooded with catalogues from Chiu Ju-Shen's Tan Chiang Book Company, and that students were placing orders for its listings at a very rapid and increasing rate. The ordering procedure was remarkably simple. Money, including postage, was remitted direct to Taipei in advance, personal checks and bank drafts being the only acceptable forms of payment. Postal money orders and currency were refused, and delivery took from four to six weeks. With every shipment received came a number of additional catalogues for the recipient to pass out among his friends. College students generally have always felt that the prices of the texts they are required to buy are too high, and one can be certain that news of the availability of textbooks at rock-bottom prices spread like a prairie fire across the Iowa State Campus. When queried as to how they first learned of Taiwan reprints, one recipient said he saw another student pondering a catalogue in the library; a second had heard talk in the barber shop of the need to form a Formosa Book Club; a third had learned of them through discussion at the laundromat; many were told of them by friends who had already purchased books. When Mr. Lee visited the campus on February 16 to learn more about the extent of the business, he was struck

54

BOOK

PIRATING

IN

TAIWAN

by the frenzied activity he found. In one office he saw six students, each of whom had already ordered five or more books. In the Chemistry Building he saw the books arriving in such quantities that a hand truck was necessary to wheel them in. It was reported that graduate students in statistics were putting together a combined order that was expected to total more than $2,000! The most active customers for the Taiwan imports at Ames on the first day that Mr. Lee visited there were graduate students in chemistry, physics, chemical engineering, mathematics, and statistics—areas in which Wiley's lists were strong. There were apparently some fields that had not yet heard of this bonanza, and the instructors themselves—with a couple of notable exceptions—appeared to be generally ignorant of the matter. Mr. Lee observed as he studied Tan Chiang's catalogues on the Ames campus "that as soon as this trickles down to the under grads it will really hurt as many of the best sellers not only of ours but also of our competitors are included in the offerings." On the following day the resourceful Mr. Lee, aided by Mr. Marshall Townsend of the Iowa State University Press, developed for Wiley—and for the rest of the publishing industry as well, since word was passed on immediately—a clear measure of the extent of Tan Chiang's inroads into Western book markets in Ames alone. By working with the local banks utilized by the students, he was able to determine the amounts of drafts made payable to Tan Chiang to that point in the school year. They were as follows: College Savings Bank Ames Trust & Savings Union Story

$1,673.97 486.47 (in 2Yi months only) 414.98 $2,575.42

Over $ 1,200 had been remitted during the first half of February alone! Most of the drafts had been made upon the Chase Manhattan Bank and appeared to clear through Hong Kong currency exchanges or banks. Mr. Lee also learned that day that

A M E S AND INDUSTRY

RESPONSE

55

some students had received catalogues not only from Tan Chiang, but also from Taiwan's most notorious pirate, the Far East Book Company. Apparently only a couple of orders had to this time been remitted to the latter firm, however. By early March the traffic at Ames in unauthorized Taiwan reprints was approaching $500 per week. Southeast and Rainbow Bridge had joined Tan Chiang and Far East as suppliers to the Ames community. Professors themselves had in some cases begun buying reprints and were announcing their availability to their classes. At faculty encouragement, freshmen had begun ordering Taipei printings of McGraw-Hill's best-selling textbook, Samuelson's Economics, for 75^ plus 12