“Only one thing is impossible for God: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet.”
— Mark Twain’s Notebook, 1902-1903
Mark Twain’s contemporary, Charles Dickens, visited America for the first time in 1842 and received a hero’s welcome. Americans loved his books. Although the books sold well in the New World, Dickens received very little in return because of a lack of enforceable copyright laws. To remedy this situation, he lobbied for international copyright protection in the United States, which came to fruition in the International Copyright Act of 1891.
