Published: The Author, 15 July 1890, pp. 73–4, anonymously.

Attribution: A signed MS of the piece is at Dalhousie University.

Text: The Author.

Notes: The title plays on that of the Incorporated Society of Authors, of which RK was a member. British authors had no copyright protection in the United States until the American International Copyright Act went into force on 1 July 1891. Before that date piracy was unrestrained, and the authors concerned rightfully felt themselves to be the victims of robbery. The Society of Authors, founded in 1884 by Sir Walter Besant, was dedicated to changing this situation.

RK was among the loudest among those who cried out for justice: see, for example, the curse he pronounced upon the Americans when he discovered, in Japan, a pirated American edition of Plain Tales from the Hills (in the original letter xx of the ‘From Sea to Sea’ letters as they appeared in the Pioneer, where the pirated book is said to have been published by the ‘Seaside Library’; the curse is omitted in the revised version of 1900 but may be found in Harbord, ii, 827–8). On American piracy, see also the poem called ‘The Rhyme of the Three Captains’ (Barrack-Room Ballads).

‘The Inauthorated Corpses’ has been reprinted in Harbord, v, 2470–2, with some small variations from the text in The Author.

Two Congresses, fifteen Legislatures, one House of Commons, and several hundred newspapers had sat upon the question of International Copyright for years; and nothing beyond pirated editions were ever hatched of it. As the honourable member for Lower Idaho pointed out in Congress:– “If we can hike down the fruit of centuries from the mossgnarled trunks of an effete civilization over the sea, why in Paradise should we pay a dollar for a book when we can hook it for a dime? Let the good work go on.” In England every vestryman knew that there were no votes to be obtained from authors, and no one could quite understand what it was that the gang wanted, or why they should actually own what they had “made out of their heads, y'know,” and the situation crystallized itself into a round game of grab.