The continued assault of Canadian pirates on his books kept Mark Twain’s interest sharply alive on the subject of copyright reform.  He invented one scheme after another, but the public-mind was hazy on the subject, and legislators were concerned with purposes that interested a larger number of voters.  There were too few authors to be of much value at the polls, and even of those few only a small percentage were vitally concerned.  For the others, foreign publishers rarely paid them the compliment of piracy, while at home the copyright limit of forty-two years was about forty-two times as long as they needed protection.  Bliss suggested a law making the selling of pirated books a penal offense, a plan with a promising look, but which came to nothing.

Clemens wrote to his old friend Rollin M. Daggett, who by this time was a Congressman.  Daggett replied that he would be glad to introduce any bill that the authors might agree upon, and Clemens made at least one trip to Washington to discuss the matter, but it came to nothing in the end.  It was a Presidential year, and it would do just as well to keep the authors quiet by promising to do something next year.  Any legislative stir is never a good thing for a campaign.

Clemens’s idea for copyright betterment was not a fixed one.  Somewhat later, when an international treaty which would include protection for authors was being discussed, his views had undergone a change.  He wrote, asking Howells: 

Will the proposed treaty protect us (and effectually) against Canadian piracy?  Because, if it doesn’t, there is not a single argument in favor of international copyright which a rational American Senate could entertain for a moment.  My notions have mightily changed lately.  I can buy Macaulay’s History, three vols.; bound, for $1.25; Chambers’s Cyclopaedia, ten vols., cloth, for $7.25 (we paid $60), and other English copyrights in proportion; I can buy a lot of the great copyright classics, in paper, at from three cents to thirty cents apiece.  These things must find their way into the very kitchens and hovels of the country.  A generation of this sort of thing ought to make this the most intelligent and the best-read nation in the world.  International copyright must becloud this sun and bring on the former darkness and dime novel reading.

Morally this is all wrong; governmentally it is all right.  For it is the duty of governments and families to be selfish, and look out simply for their own.  International copyright would benefit a few English authors and a lot of American publishers, and be a profound detriment to twenty million Americans; it would benefit a dozen American authors a few dollars a year, and there an end.  The real advantages all go to English authors and American publishers.

    And even if the treaty will kill Canadian piracy, and thus save me
    an average of $5,000 a year, I’m down on it anyway, and I’d like
    cussed well to write an article opposing the treaty.