Book Pirating in Taiwan

Book Pirating in Tjaiwan

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

To Jane who makes all things right

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

&©

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 <3uggenheim Fellowship and an equally generous sabbatical leaye 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 Enroll 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 tune of many persons. I gladly acknowledge my debt therefore to all who aided me. Nashville, Tennessee January 1, 1968

D. K.

£•£•

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

Contents

Through Tara's Halls: The Beginnings of Copyright Pan Ch'uan: Literary Property in the East A Lick and a Promise: First Attempts at Resolution EB and the Gathering Storm Ames and Industry Response The Political and Diplomatic Fronts The Carrot and the Stick: Reactions on Taiwan And Never the Twain . . . : Negotiations Flounder With Opium and Gold: The Smuggling of Books Hope Springs Eternal . . . : New Efforts to Bkrgain Dashed Hopes and Greater Chaos: The Situation Worsens 12. This Point Whither: The Present Scene and CJurrent Trends Appendix: Death of a President; a Case Study Index

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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 Finhian. 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: "To every cow her calf; therefore to every book its copy," thus resolving the case in favor of Finnian. The 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 ind publishers, judges, and scholars for more than a milleniuni 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 wasfinallyresolved 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. Frofri 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 vigoroujs reprinter of English books. All dealt in America's extensive piratical trade. The 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 iof 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 from 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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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 sjome 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 up residence there; 7. the barren state of American letters was due not to unfair competition from nonroyalty copy but ratrier 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 dn the issue. It had been beaten each time by public apathy, other pressing business in the Congress, general anti-British feeling, I 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, j 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 Lehmann-Haupt 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 League," followed in 1887 by the "American Publishers Copyright League." 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 Berne 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 certain commercial and labor interests that have insisted upon retention of the manufacturing clause of 1891. Many American books meanwhile have received the1 benefits of the Berne Convention by being published simultaneously in one of the Berne signatory nations, usually Great Britianjor Canada. Meanwhile a new convention, the Universal Copyright Convention, was hammered out in the early 1950's under the auspices of UNESCO. The UCC furnishes! substantial international protection with a minimum of red tape land is how subscribed to by most nations. The 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.

UU 2 Pan Ch'ucm-. 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 Vas 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 cdnceived 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 invplved 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 eiemplar 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. Had 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 needed already existed in English language books, but to translate everything that would have been useful would alone have proved an insurmountable task, and,

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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 arid 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 madean 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-

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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 literacy property, except for translations which were free for th$ 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 sljiort 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. The Tokyo pirate of the Wiley booksj Susumu Yamamoto 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. Yamamoto 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;

24

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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 EAST

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 jit 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 j. . . , 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 b6ok, 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 hot 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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BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

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 (italkjs added): The nationals, corporations and Associations of either High Contracting Party shall be ajecorded 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.

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 80 140 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. i 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 edition's 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: "After 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 eclaircissement. 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 (GRC). 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 GRC 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 (MOI) 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

FIRST ATTEMPTS AT RESOLUTION

31

from 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 wasj twenty-five times the sale price of the publication. Barring fMfillment of these requirements, injured American publishers had no legal recourse. \ On February 14, 1955, the American Book Publishers Council (ABPC) communicated these requirements to the members of its Copyright Committee and to its Joint Foreign Trade Committee, joint, that is, with the American Textbook Publishers Institute. It also requested the U.S. Copyright Office and the Department 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 upon—although it was not limited to—the need to pay twenty-five times the sale price of the publication. Being in the practice of paying only $4.00 to register a book with the U.S. Copyright Office, thereby guaranteeing protection in the whole American market, New York publishers could not understand the need to pay sixty times as much tc| register the same $10 book in Taipei, where at best they could probably not sell more than a dozen copies at Western prices anyway. It was not possible economically to justify registering under these conditions. Many 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 books with the MOI 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. American 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 thq 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 bjehavior. 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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35

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 j vigorous booksellers in the Republic of China during the perjod from 1954 to 1958 were the Southeast Book Company qn Po Ai Road in the heart of Old Taipei, and the Tung If a 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 ABC Store (for American Book Company). Headed by a man named Hsu Yung-Fa, Far 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 titles 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 eaijly 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 Kmerican 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 tegard 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 sustained injury through piracy. 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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39

although they bridled somewhat at the thought that this was the only viable course of action remaining open to them. In late 1957, at any rate, Heath, Wiley, Addison-Wesley, Ginn, and Freeman registered a total of eight titles with the Ministry of Interior in Taipei and simultaneously authorized their local reprinting. All eight of these authorizations were made to Mr. Choh of Southeast Book Company, who immediately took steps to protect his newly acquired! property. Through advertising their new status, discussion with school and educational authorities, and the threat of legal action, he made much of the industry in both countries for the first time aware that protection of authorized reprints could be thus gained. Most if not all of the titles authorized to Southeast had already been pirated in Taiwan, and their first reprinters were caught with substantial stocks of the unauthorized printings still on their hands. Realizing that they could no longer sell these books without risking legal action, several pirates disposed of them at wholesale to Mr. Choh, who "legitimized" them by paying royalty on them, and then sold them back at a higher price to be retailed as authorized editions, again at a price sufficiently advanced to cover the royalty cost. It was beginning to appear as though ja new era had arrived in which the Taiwan book industry coulil work at harmony and for mutual gain with those in the rest of the world.

EB AND THE GATHERING STORM

&& 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

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 I was still enough anti-Japanese feeling remaining in Taiwan froni 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 reptints 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 comijng 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

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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. He 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 Encyclopaedia 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 Encyclopaedia 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 STORM

43

lower in the bookstores, so that on occasion it could be had for no more than $45 U.S. Actually it had been generally known in the Taipei trade fully two months earlier that the EB was going to be pirated, and the word had got back to the original jpublisher. Here, it was felt, was a challenge that could not go unmet, and an attorney, Mr. Li Tse-Min, was retained in Taipei to take appropriate legal action. Mr. Li immediately filed with the MOI for registration of the original Western edition—dpspite the substantial fee of ten times the American price—and began in April to warn the Taipei booksellers that they would be handling pirated copies at their peril, since they could be caught holding large stocks of the expensive piracy which would be subject to confiscation as soon as registration procedures were complete. Most booksellers at first played a cautious, waitand-see game with respect to the EB, but when the piracy finally appeared near the first of June 1959 and registration proceedings had still not been completed on the Western edition, all restraints were broken. Literally all bookstores moved ahead immediately with the sale of the counterfeit. The work sold extremely well, and despite frantic announcements by Mr. Li on June 13 that he was filing lawsuits against certain of the principals in the matter, such action was never taken. j The Ministry of Interior gave every appearance of dragging its feet in the matter of registration for the EB, and it may well have been doing just that. Certainly it was caught between two strong conflicting pressures. The American Embassy was pushing the Government of the Republic of China very hard to complete the registration as rapidly as possible so that legal action could be taken against the pirates. Doubtless, however, counterpressures of a less readily identifiable and much more insidious nature were also being brought to bear upon the MOI to deny the requested registration. There were, however, real legal and censorship issues at stake in the matter which were troubling the MOI. The

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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

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cally that the University of Stanford had reprinted Chinese books. Thus the MOI had problems to resolve beyond i the simple issuing of the registration, and the case began to take! on some of the appearance of a cause celebre. The reprinter, of course, protested Mb innocence of wrongdoing, claiming that his reprinting was not pjrompted 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 this 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

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EB AND THE GATHERING STORM

47

"if you subscribe now, you will also receive free of charge one original copy of the Webster's New World Dictionary or American College Dictionary." One Taipei bookseller, himself of necessity a pirate although in favor of a statute outlawing it, wrote on June 24 to McGraw-Hill:

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.

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 EB for something like $45. We regret to say that the outcome of the court fight remains very much in doubt, as the EB 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.

Doubtless lurking in the backs of some of the leading minds pondering the problem were the substantial pirofits being gleaned from the sale of the EB. The reprinters wouid 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 onje, but with results which were at long last satisfying to the Anierican publishers. Registration was finally granted to the Encyclopaedia 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 MOI for similar protection. Some received it while others did not, primarily because of too frequent "inaccuracies" in their texts to allow for censorship ap-

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 ho 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 do 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. The 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

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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 Encyclopedia Britannica, turned around, and immediately sunk it all and more into the unauthorized reprinting of literally hundreds of additional Western titles. 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 directly from Formosa as

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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, i 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. I 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 bo^ks 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.

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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 theflowof 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

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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 j 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 jeffective 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 j to do in the past, but for worldwide markets. Piracy was nojw 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 this 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 lettej, 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

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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.

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 j 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 tb 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

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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 somefieldsthat 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 23^ 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

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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^ postage instead of the original at $6.75; there were 1,400 freshman at Iowa State for whom this was an assigned text! University reaction was prompt. The next faculty Newsletter carried a stern administration admonishment on the subject. The student magazine, Scientist, carried an excellent objective article on pirating, but with a prefatory editorial averring that "it is a sad commentary on the personal ethics of students when they do not know that to support the stealing of material that belongs to American publishers and authors is wrong." Ironically, two books among the reprints listed in the Chinese catalogues had been pirated from the Iowa State University Press itself—a veterinary text and The Death of Adam by Iowa State professor, Dr. John C. Greene. The Iowa State Daily also carried several articles discouraging the use of Taiwan reprints by American students, but doubtless its most pathetic column on the matter was a letter to the editor, signed by nineteen students, which read as follows: To the Editor: After reading the front page article "Chinese Book Pirates Racket Includes Iowa State Campus" which appeared in the March 23 issue of the Daily regarding the statement by the American Textbook Pub-

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lishers Institute that "the pirates use Chinese students in this country as salesmen," we, the undersigned, comprising all the Chinese students at Iowa State University, wish to go on record that we neither are, nor have been, associated as representatives for the said firms. The ATPI may indeed have been correct in its attribution of some of the American marketing effort of the pirates to Chinese students in the United States, but it had also to be recognized that among the university students of that time were thousands of American youths who had seen military service in the Republic of China. Almost all of them had had first-hand contact with Taipei pirate firms, and they were as able as anyone else to recognize a bargain when they saw one. Indeed, it was finally determined that these students had been the source of Taiwan books in Ames. A graduate student in the physics department had had a brother return from Korea via Formosa, where he had picked up a bookseller's catalogue. The graduate student ordered from it, received his books, and the race was on. At any rate, as the American book industry surveyed the Ames situation and extrapolated it to the two thousand other colleges and universities in the land, it recognized clearly that it either was then sustaining, or was about to sustain, millions of dollars in losses to counterfeit books. Before the end of March 1960, reports had been received that Taiwan reprints were turning up on many other campuses of the country as well. Colorado State University, North Dakota Agricultural College, Princeton University, University of Wisconsin, University of Minnesota, M.I.T., Johns Hopkins, all had students using Taiwan reprints. A bookseller at the University of Colorado complained in Publishers' Weekly on March 28: This matter has reached serious proportions . . . Our business has suffered a noticeable decline because many of our customers have been ordering their books from Formosan publishers. We find ourselves with a large number of tech-

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nical books that have suddenly slowed in their rate of turnover. Other similar complaints were received from other booksellers as well. It was obvious that the skirmishes in which the American industry had engaged the enemy in the past had been only that and that the time had now come to bring as much pressure to bear upon him as a full-scale effort could muster. Substantial action had really been begun in late 1959 with efforts to apprise the United States government of the seriousness of the threat to the American book industry, and some government officials had come to have a sense of the gravity of the situation. The industry, frustrated at least in part in its efforts to elicit what it felt to be effective protection for its wares through the State Department, had begun in 1959 to try to explain the problem to the Congress. Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut became concerned and on August 14 himself queried the State Department on the matter. The Department replied on August 25, explaining that: 1. The basis of the problem was economic. | 2. The Taiwanese legal situation was somewhat unfavorable to American publishers. 3. The Chinese government was generally sympathetic to American publishers and authors but found piracy difficult to detect and control because the firms involved were normally not well established but were rather individuals operating from small shops which frequently changed their places of operation. 4. The Department of State's position had been to encourage American publishers to register their works in China and authorize the production of low-priced reprints there. These were valid points, but they offered little hope to the beleaguered American industry. The third point, although perhaps sincerely proposed by the State Department, was more a

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GRC rationalization than it was a fact; certainly the Taiwan printers themselves were often transient operators but the booksellers who ran the industry were substantial, well-known firms. And, of course, the American industry had already decided that it could not concur with the fourth point in the State Department's letter. On August 21, 1959, Bruce Y. Brett, president of Macmillan, testified before the Senate Appropriations Committee on behalf of the American Book Publishers Council and the American Textbook Publishers Institute. The Committee was at that time considering the Mutual Security appropriation, and Mr. Brett pointed out that the current publishing climate in Taiwan was not, in the eyes of the American industry, in the best interests of the Mutual Security Program. He stated that the Program . . . for which you are appropriating is aimed largely at the economic development of the Far East. As a part of that development, the United States Government has done much to encourage the provision of scientific and technical books and textbooks for the students, physicians, scientists, and engineers of those countries. It has given tens of thousands of such books as gifts. It has encouraged their importation by the countries in the Mutual Security Program. It has encouraged American publishers to establish elaborate commercial arrangements to ship books to those countries and to manufacture inexpensive editions in Asia especially for sale there. Going further, many hundreds of thousands of dollars of American taxpayers' money have been spent through the Mutual Security Agency and other agencies to encourage the development of local publishing industries in such countries as Burma and the Philippines to meet acute local needs for educational and scientific and technical books. All of this effort will be set back or totally frustrated if all orderly methods of publishing and supplying books are subject to this sort of systematic piracy. . . .

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The operations of publishers in Taiwan are having just this sort of disruptive effect through much of the Far East, and they are growing from month to month. Mr. Brett then stated that relatively simple measures on the part of the Government of the Republic of China could alleviate this situation, although he did not state what these measures would be. Presumably they could have included signing the jUniversal Copyright Convention or concluding a bilateral treaty with the United States protecting reciprocally the literary properties of each other's nationals. Knowing full well the Chinese fear of taking such action, however, it is more likely that the ABPCATPI would have settled for something less, such perhaps as: (1) simplification of registration and enforcement procedures; and (2) barring the exportation from Taiwan of reprinted Western books. At any rate, he concluded his statement by saying: We want in no way to interfere with the important work of the Mutual Security Agency or to see its appropriations curtailed. Nor do we believe that specific legislation or appropriation limitations are at this time [sic] necessary. But we do hope that this Committee will keep a watchful eye on future developments and will see fit to express its concern in its report on the present bill or in other appropriate manner. When the Senate Committee Report [No. 981] appeared three weeks later it alluded to Mr. Brett's testimony and "directed" the Department of State "to look into this problem land exert every effort in an attempt to have it discontinued." The activities of the American publishing industry in combatting piracy over the subsequent twelve months were severalfold. In the first place, it continued to harangue the Department of State, which now found itself being pressured by the Congress on one side and the industry on the other. Letters concerning piracy went to the Department from publishing houses, associations, and industry representatives on May 11,

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August 12, and December 15, 1959; and on February 11 and March 4, 1960. Robert Frase, the able Associate Managing Director of the ABPC, and others literally camped on the doorsteps of appropriate government officials during the period. In the second place, the American industry began to assume an even less tractable attitude toward Taiwan publishers than it had held before. When Franklin Publications approached McGraw-Hill in late 1959 to purchase authorization for the translation of three books into Chinese for the Taiwan market, McGraw-Hill refused to grant the permission. It took the position that until it had been assured that strong, official protests on piracy had been lodged with the GRC, it would not negotiate with anyone representing Chinese publishing interests in any way. It should be noted, that, although translation rights were not legally required in China, Franklin certainly would not have considered proceeding with the work without them. McGraw-Hill's position on translation rights was urged upon the entire American publishing industry early the following year by the ABPC and ATPI. An ad hoc subcommittee of their Joint Foreign Trade Committee was appointed to study all aspects of the Taiwan piracy problem and how to combat it. One of its major assignments was to determine the best stance American firms should assume vis-a-vis the Taiwan book trade. Upon deliberation that subcommittee concluded that it would be unwise for American houses to cede rights to Taiwan publishers for either facsimile or translation editions. It was recognized that withholding rights as a punitive measure would be ineffective, because the Chinese firm desiring to reprint or translate could if it chose do so anyway, but the subcommittee felt that refusal by American firms to negotiate would at least serve as one more way of expressing their indignation over the rampant piracy situation. This hardening position was not what was needed at that time to alleviate or solve the problem, because it lacked all possibility of enforcement; it cut off what few commu-

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nication channels remained between the industries of the two countries; and it appeared to justify the fear among GRC officials that, if copyright protection were given to them, American publishers could not be counted upon to administer that protection in any but their own interest. What was badly needed at the time was new and imaginative thinking as to ho>v the two industries could increase rather than decrease their contacts to their mutual benefit. Third, the American industry continued and expanded its efforts to alert the legislative branch of government to the gravity of the piracy situation. Letters and visits to senators and representatives, individually and in committee, went forward from members of the industry, and a rather high level of congressional interest and concern was generated in the matter. Although the Congress was not in any better position than the State Department to take positive, curative action, it could be, as later developments would indicate, a valuable ally insofar as helping to elicit Chinese action was concerned. A fourth front opened up by the American industry was a broad-gauge publicity campaign designed to educate the public to the piracy issue. Among actions recognized as having potential effectiveness in contributing partially to the general public education on the problem were continued letters to congressmen; the publication of articles by authors whose works were being pirated; the solicitation of support from educational associations whose author members were losing much in royalty payments; and articles in the public press. Recognition of the problem by the jpublic at large began promptly to manifest itself with increasing frequency, and this recognition was indeed overdue and healthy. Stories appeared in The Wall Street Journal on March 15, 1960; in The New York Times on March 21, March 25, and April 4; on March 22 in The Times of London; and in Time magazine of April 4. It is understandable that these stories almost uniformly and exclusively presented the American view of the piracy problem, but at least one statement in the public press chided

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the American industry for its self-righteous and inflexible position. The Baltimore Sun on March 26 observed that: The United States cannot protest with a completely clear conscience since its own record in the matter of book burglary is terrible. While this country was largely an importer of literature, it imported with a free hand and with little compensation to authors. When America's own literary productions began to attract world attention they were pirated in their turn, and the United States continued to hold aloof from the Berne Convention of 1886, under which most civilized countries afforded reciprocal protection to the authors of member nations, though it made many bilateral copyright treaties. Such public utterances were understandably unwelcome by American publishers, and the files of at least one major news source contain a letter written that week by an important industry spokesman requesting permission to read any story it might propose to print to assure that it "fairly represents the industry position" in the matter. An interesting difference existed between the English clamor in the nineteenth century for American copyright protection and the current American drive for Chinese protection. Whereas in the 1800's it had been authors who had led the fight for copyright, it was now almost entirely a publishers' fight. This difference resulted, at least in part, from the fact that the concept of a publisher as an author's agent responsible for looking after his interests was now much more fully developed than it was 150 years ago. It is probably more difficult, however, to develop public sympathy for the violated rights of multimillion-dollar publishing firms than it is for grubbing, impoverished, individual authors. This likelihood began to become apparent to the industry in early 1960, and it reoriented somewhat its public statements to reflect it. In a letter protesting piracy to the Secretary of State dated March 4, written jointly by Curtis G. Benjamin, then president of the ABPC, and Alden H.

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Clark of the ATPI, it was pointed out that the people most immediately affected and the heaviest losers from piratical traffic were authors. Five days later it was acknowledged in a meeting of the adhoc subcommittee on Taiwan Piracy of the Joint Foreign Trade Committee that publishers are rich in the eyes of many, and care should therefore be taken to make it clear that a major share of the industry's concern over the piracy problem was in the names of the many authors it represented. Doubtless another reason for author unconcern has been that the organized association of authors, the Authors League, has consisted primarily of literary authors, whereas the impact of Formosan piracy was largely in the area of scientific, technical, and professional books, the authors of which have had no organization. At any rate, spontaneous author concern has been surprisingly absent throughout the period of Taiwan piracy. Indeed, to be pirated in Taiwan has become to some authors a kind of badge of accomplishment and attainment, similar to being banned in Boston. The protests have uniformly come from the industry. As much as the American industry would like to have seen the Republic of China join other nations in signing the Universal Copyright Convention, the realists within it recognized that it would not happen soon. In their aspirations for a solution most American publishers concurred withj Wiley's Frank Forkert, who wrote in late 1959: I think the most imperative thing is that we stop the distribution of these books from Formosa toi other places. Once this has happened, and we have secured practical and reasonable protection under the laws of Formosa, perhaps we can then once again consider how to supply more inexpensive books to Formosan students. Hopefully, these developments would take place given proper industry pressure qn the diplomatic and legislative arms of the

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United States Government and a satisfactory program of public education in the matter. To that time, however, the industry did not feel that it had aroused sufficient attention to the piracy problem on these fronts to elicit from them any helpful contributions to a solution. Morale was at a low ebb.

T4U 6 The Political and Diplomatic Fronts

Concern for the problem of Chinese piracy, as has been implied, ranged from limited to mild within the Department of State prior to 1960. Each specific complaint from the American industry was thoroughly checked out through the Taipei Embassy, but there was seldom as much real initiative in efforts to resolve the issue as the New York publishers would like to have seen. Much of the State Department's lack of enthusiasm for the subject doubtless arose out of a basic feeling of helplessness. The only possible resolution that could satisfy all American publishers—although certainly not the official industry position in the matter—would be for the Republic of China to sign the Universal Copyright Convention. This the GRC did not feel it could afford to do, and the State Department was reluctant to attempt to force it to do so, notwithstanding certain "hardline" opinions to the contrary within the American industry. There have in fact always been reservations among some American officials that signing the UCC would be in the best interests either of China or of the West. It has been important to Western interests for its information to flow as freely as possible into developing areas, and certainly the Taipei pirates were assuring such a flow into China. This view, for good reason amounting almost to pure heresy in the eyes of the New York industry, was seldom expressed, although it did emerge clearly in the aforementioned devil's-advocate editorial in the Baltimore Sun. We read constantly [its author observed] of the tremendous amounts of money and effort the Soviet Union is

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putting into its scheme to flood the bookstalls of Asia with cheap literature, often in English. There is a lot to be said from the propaganda angle for a system under which Asian? can get, at a price they can afford, an American rather than a Soviet encyclopedia for technical or political work. Ambivalence therefore manifested itself in report after report from the State Department to the American industry on its complaints. State, in fact, uniformly concluded each such report with a paragraph urging that as part of any solution there should be the authorization by Americans of low-priced reprints for the Taiwan markets. The Department of State was as concerned as anyone about the loss of American property, but it also saw more clearly than some the need to preserve Taiwan's easy access to the information it needed. Given these apparently contradictory motivations, State Department officials worked long and hard and unpublicized to explain, to cajole, to wheedle, to educate the Chinese government into taking a new look at its piratical trade in search of a reconciliation that would be more palatable to Western book interests. Its efforts, as will be seen later, were not wholly unsuccessful, but because it had to lay its own foundations for building a body of ethical concern for the problem within GRC, its successes were slow in coming and modest when they arrived. Certainly they were neither prompt nor substantive enough to assuage the ire of an indignant American publishing industry. For these reasons the industry increasingly turned its attentions from the State Department to the Congress in its hopes for action in the matter. Being an elected body, the Congress has always been more responsive to the concerns of its constituency, and for the same reason it has never been quite as sensitive as State to the problems and needs of foreign nations. This has been especially true when those nations were receiving United States financial assistance, and the Republic of China

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was at the time a substantial recipient of such aid. Because of its control over appropriations, moreover, the wishes of the Congress weigh heavily in the determination of the success of all Federal programs; it simply will not fund what it does not like, so it was important for the State Department to have its programs liked. The American publishers' work with the Congress went well. As has been mentioned, Senator jThomas J. Dodd approached the State Department in mid-August 1959, and Bruce Brett's testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee a week later prompted a strongly worded directive to the Department of State to "exert every effort in an attempt to have piracy discontinued." Soon thereafter Senator William Fulbright asked the State Department to testify on the matter before his Foreign Relations Committee, and Congressman Walter H. Judd, one of the pillars in the so-called "China Lobby," became sufficiently exercised about the problem to arrange an appointment to discuss it with the Chines^ Ambassador. As a result of this focusing of congressional attention on Taiwan piracy, together with the historical concern for the matter on the diplomatic level, and augmented by growing awareness and interest in the issue on the part of the public at large, several specific and forceful actions were t^ken by the American government to mitigate the situation during 1959 and 1960. These included: (1) threatened discontinuation of Mutual Security Aid to China; (2) the actual termination of the so-called Informational Media Guarantee; (3) a customs ban on importation into the United States of Taiwan reprints; and (4) a conference on the issue which brought together American industry representatives and high-level diplomatic officials of the GRC. Each of these developments will be discussed here in some detail. The first action—threatened discontinuation of aid to China—has already received some attention in this monograph. Bruce Brett's statement to the Senate Appropriations

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Committee during its deliberations concerned with aid to China contained judiciously placed italics when he said that the ABPC-ATPI did not believe that "appropriations limitations are at this time necessary." The considered implication was clear that such limitations on Mutual Security Aid, without which the Republic of China would then have been in desperate straits, might soon become necessary. This testimony and its impact upon the congressional committee was forwarded home promptly by the Chinese Embassy in Washington and served as an incentive to GRC officials to seek more vigorously a solution to the piracy issue. Also, the United States Information Service in Taipei issued a press release on Mr. Brett's testimony, attaching his full text as news background. Both Chinese and English-language newspapers in Taipei carried the story, and these stories contributed to the growing consciousness on the part of the Chinese of United States anxiety over the piracy issue. The second forceful Washington action designed to prod the Republic of China to do something concrete about piracy was the discontinuation of the Informational Media Guarantee. The IMG was a U.S. Information Agency program under which countries which lacked dollars could purchase American informational materials and pay for them with their own normally nonconvertible currencies. With authority based upon a bilateral agreement between the United States and the government of a participating country, the USIA contracted with American book exporters to buy from them the otherwise nonconvertible foreign currency which they received in payment for the books, periodicals, motion pictures, and other eligible materials they supplied to dealers in the foreign country. In other words, the retail purchaser of such material in a foreign country paid his local dealer at the regular commercial price in his own currency, this same currency was remitted to the American exporter who then sold it for dollars to the U.S. Treasury, which in turn sold it to the USIA for meeting local expenses in its country of origin.

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The IMG program had long been an important device for maintaining the flow of needed American information into developing countries. It had operated smoothly in some twenty countries since its establishment following World War II, and the dollar-short and information-hungry Republic jof China had understandably been a substantial beneficiary of it! According to Bank of Taiwan statistics, there were in 1959 alone $340,000 worth of "active" contracts involved in the IMG program on the island. Its importance to the continued growth of the Republic's economy at that time can be readily understood. In August of 1959 it was decided in Washington —especially in view of increasing worldwide competition for limited IMG funds—that a firm action that could be taken as an expression of concern for book piracy would be the discontinuation of the IMG program in Taiwan. This move was made with the approbation of many representatives of the American publishing industry, although there was also considerable Equivocation in the United States government as to its overall | wisdom. Nonetheless on August 13 the Department of State notified the Embassy in Taipei that the IMG program in Taiwan would be suspended in fiscal year 1960, but it allowed the Embassy to pass the bad news on to GRC officials as and when it deemed best. Perhaps understandably, this news was received with minimal enthusiasm in the Mission in Taipei, and a decision was made there not to notify the Chinese government immediately of the program's termination. The fact, however, soon became known because within a few weeks Chinese book importers began receiving notices that their IMG contracts were not being renewed. Booksellers sought the reasons for the cutoff from the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which in turn asked the same questions of USIS and Embassy officials. In the ensuing dialogue between United States and Chinese officials concerning the IMG cutback, the Embassy diplomatically:

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1. admitted that the program had indeed been terminated with respect to Taiwan but that the GRC had not yet been notified because there was hope in some quarters that it might be at least partially reinstated; 2. announced that its termination in Taiwan was only part of worldwide curtailment of the IMG program which was necessitated by reduced congressional appropriations; 3. finally hinted that the flagrant book piracy existing in Taiwan may have had something to do with the suspension of the IMG program there. The Chinese Foreign Ministry officials were greatly troubled by the IMG discontinuation and pointed out in reply that: 1. Publications imported under the program were important to the economic and cultural growth of China. 2. Continuity in the program was important, and once it stopped it would require much effort to have it reestablished. 3. As implemented, the curtailed IMG program discriminated against Free China, a faithful ally in the Cold War, while such Communist nations as Poland continued to benefit from it. 4. It would be almost impossible for the GRC to allot adequate dollars from its short supply of foreign exchange to maintain the necessary importation of American books. 5. GRC's recent action in the Encyclopedia Britannica case was evidence of its concern for the piracy problem. 6. IMG's suspension would work a real hardship on many firms that had little or nothing to do with piracy. In view of these points, the GRC sought reconsideration of the decision to suspend the IMG program in Taiwan. This lengthy interchange of considerations, many of which bordered upon the irrelevant, was simply the polite way of doing business. Both sides understood fully that

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the IMG curtailment would never have taken place if Chinese booksellers had not trafficked in unauthorized reprints. All of the secondary points, of course, were valid too, especially the final one that the IMG suspension would punish the wrong parties. A large share of IMG imports were magazines rather than books, and the Formosan Magazine Press and Fu Tar Hong, who between them controlled 95 percent of the Taiwan magazine market, suffered especially. They could not understand why they should be thus singled out for persecution since they were not even involved in book publishing. Furthermore, it was argued that suspension of the IMG would make book importation more difficult and therefore render piracy even more attractive than it had been before. IMG discontinuation thus was clearly recognized for what it was—a strong protest, regardless of consequences, from the United States to the Republic of China concerning the book piracy activities. Both the American Embassy and the Ideal U.S. Information Service, had of course, to ponder the impact of IMG suspension not only upon the specific matter of book piracy but upon the entire spectrum of country and program objectives for Taiwan as well. They frankly doubted that suspension was in the best interest of total country objectives, and they urged Washington to reconsider. At the same time, however, they stressed in their continuing discussion with GRC officials that United States concern for piracy would not be assuaged until there was: 1. actual incorporation into the copyright law of certain revisions in its implementation procedures; 2. reduction in the cost of book registration for copyright; 3. revision of the law so as to limit and simplify censorship examination for copyright registration; 4. the provision by law of more severe penalties for book pirates; 5. positive action by the GRC to halt the exportation from Taiwan of unauthorized reprints.

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All in all, the discussions over the IMG suspension were salutary. They made it amply clear to officials of the Government of the Republic of China that the United States publishing industry, the State Department, the Congress, and the American people themselves were coming rapidly to a point where they would no longer tolerate piracy of their books, whether legally or illegally, and that they would take any steps necessary to see it end. The American book industry was anxious, however, that the government of the United States not put all its faith in hoped-for Chinese action to end the Taiwan reprinting problem. In addition to the pressure brought to bear upon the Chinese through discontinuation of the IMG and the threat of termination of Mutual Security Aid, New York book interests also sought relief from the problem of reprint importation through the Bureau of Customs. In a joint letter dated February 11, 1960, addressed to Secretary of State Christian A. Herter, writers Curtis G. Benjamin representing the ABPC and Alden H. Clark of the ATPI reminded him that importation of pirated books into the United States was illegal. Although they recognized that it would doubtless prove extremely difficult for the Customs Service to catch small shipments, they hoped that a way would be found to control their importation to some extent. It should be noted that this letter was written five days before the news broke of the quantity importation of books into Ames, Iowa. On March 7, the ABPC and ATPI approached the Bureau of Customs direct with a request that customs officers be instructed to stop and search all shipments from Taiwan book dealers and seize books of American authorship on the grounds that they were being imported in violation of the manufacturing clause of the United States Copyright Law. Upon deliberation the Bureau determined and reported three weeks later that it could indeed, under section 107 of the Copyright Law (17 U.S. Code 107) and Section 11.21 of the Customs Regulations, prohibit importation of unauthorized reprints if

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they bore copyright notices. However, in the absence of such copyright notices in the pirated editions, customs could only deny admittance to those titles for which the copyrights had been recorded individually with the Bureau by the original copyright holders. This latter process would be admittedly cumbersome, but the Commissioner of Customs was sympathetic, and he pledged to work on the problem. He concluded his reply by stating that "the Bureau appreciates the serious firiancial threat which this piracy represents to the American publishing community, and steps have been taken which it is hoped will greatly reduce or eliminate this unlawful practice." The determination by Customs that, in the absence of copyright notice, it could only act if individual titles were registered with it was a blow to American publishers, because in both direct cost and overhead such registration would have been prohibitively expensive. This procedure required that a publisher pay to the Customs Bureau a fee of $75 and furnish no fewer than 1,000 title cards for every title in his lists that he wished to see protected! As was pointed out in a joint XBPC-ATPI letter to Senator Carl Hayden, Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, on June 2, 1960: "A publisher with an extensive list of books would be obliged under this system to pay total fees of $75,000 to $150,000 and to supply from 1,000,000 to 2,000,000 cards." Clearly this could hot be done. Despite its opinion that it could not act against unregistered book importations lacking copyright notices, the Bureau of Customs did proceed vigorously in cases where! it felt it was on solid legal ground. By early May 1960, a considerable volume of seizures had built up in customs offices around the country. In a fair number of the shipments some of the books bore the illegal copyright notices whereas others did not, and a delay developed in customs handling of such shipments while the Bureau studied its best action regarding them. Eventually it was decided that the books which lacked the notice and for which no fee or title cards had been received should be turned

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over to the addressee, the balance of course remaining impounded. Despite the fact that some books thereafter continued to get through this net, the further fact that many were confiscated and others delayed made book importation from Taiwan a very risky business and tended to discourage prospective American book purchasers from attempting to meet their needs through Chinese sources. In connection with this discussion, an interesting and pertinent press release was distributed by the Treasury Department fully two years later. It is quoted here in full: TREASURY DEPARTMENT WASHINGTON, D.C.,

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owners failed to record their copyrights with the Bureau of Customs. The present action is being taken by Customs because it appears that the flow of pirated books has risen to the point where the Government is justified in taking across-the-board action to enforce the copyright law, even though copyright owners may not have protected their copyrights fully by recording them with Customs. Books found to be in violation of the Copyright law will be seized by Customs and destroyed. Commissioner Nichols recommends, especially to college students, that no more books be ordered from Taiwan and Hong Kong.

June 18, 1962 IMMEDIATE

RELEASE

CUSTOMS COMMISSIONER ORDERS PIRATED BOOKS DETAINED Commissioner of Customs Philip Nichols, Jr., has taken action under the copyright and customs law to stem the flow of pirated books into the United States. The Commissioner has instructed Customs officers to detain all books in the English language imported from Taiwan and Hong Kong until it can be determined whether their importation would be in violation of the copyright law. Recently it has been found that many books written and copyrighted in the Unitel States are being unlawfully reproduced in Taiwan and Hong Kong and shipped to the United States for sale at prices lower than the American publishers' prices. A large number of these are college textbooks^ Commissioner Nichols said that pirated copies of American books have succeeded in entering the United States primarily because the American copyright

By this time the importation of unauthorized Taiwan reprints had somewhat subsided, but the action was nonetheless welcome even at that late date by American publishers. As a fourth concrete action on the government level, the United States book trade sought and received a fulldress discussion of the piracy matter with Chinese Embassy officials in Washington. The meeting took place on September 13, 1960, with the American industry represented by!Warren Sullivan, Curtis Benjamin, L. L. Bruggeman, Bruce Brett, Dan Lacy, and Robert Frase. Present for the Embassy \tere Dr. Yi-Seng Kiang, Minister of Embassy, Dr. W. Y. Tsao, Cultural Counselor, and two junior officials. Mr. Sullivan, then chairman of the ABPC-ATPI Joint International Trade Committee, spoke for the American book trade. He indicated that he : and his colleagues were gratified at the recent actions of the Government of the Republic of China in reducing some of the worst piratical abuses and expressed hope that they might provide a framework for more satisfactory relationships in the future— leading ideally to accession by the GRC to the Universal Copyright Convention. Specifically and for the time being, however, he pointed out two things: (1) that the requirements for local

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registration for copyright protection in the Republic were both too costly and too cumbersome for the American industry, and (2) that nothing short of a total and effective embargo on book exportation from Taiwan could be acceptable to the American trade. Minister Kiang responded that a major impediment in the way of Chinese adherence to the UCC was fear of being cut off from the use of foreign material in translation; that the American views on registration procedures would be forwarded to Taipei but that ten times the price of a book was not intended to be a discriminatory fee; it had been set by law and was certainly not exorbitant for domestic publications. He then presented a document addressed by the booksellers of Taipei to the American industry proposing an authorized American book reproduction program in Taiwan. The proposal—about which more will be said later—had been prepared by a consortium of booksellers in Taiwan and had been received shortly before the meeting. Following discussion of various points in the proposal, the meeting adjourned ;with the understanding that it would be reviewed in detail and a counterproposal filed with the Embassy for return transmission to the Taiwan association. These then were four offensive actions taken at the governmental level in response to the threat of large-scale losses to rampant Taiwan piracy. Financial aid to the Republic of China had been curtailed, and further cuts were being publicly discussed. Importation of Taiwan reprints into the United States was being hampered, if not halted. And a diplomatic offensive had been mounted through the Chinese Embassy. The next step was up to the Chinese.

The Carrot and the Stick: Reactions on Taiwan

As a result of these many efforts to combat Chinese piracy on the parts of the American publishing community, the Department of State, the Congress, and the public press in the United States, GRC officials came gradually to recognize that they would have eventually to deal substantially and constructively with the problem, and that the sooner it could be done the better. This recognition was either quite prompt in developing, or it was inordinately slow, depending upon the stance one takes in viewing what had to take place. The fact that the international ethical considerations involved in pirating had never really occurred to anyone in China prior to 1955, for example, was a great deterrent to action; an enormous amount of public education had to take place before sufficiently widespread concern for the matter could be generated there to warrant action. Another factor which tended to delay action on the part of the Chinese was simply that the Oriental concept of urgency differed considerably from that of the West; time perspective was different. Things generally have seldom been done there at the same rapid rate of accomplishment that is sought in the West, although the degree of differentiation lessens with each passing year. Still a third point that has to be borne in mind was that any changes that were to come had to suffer the painstaking scrutiny of the GRC bureaucracy which, as have all bureaucracies, moved excruciatingly slowly; it required time, time, time, to bring together and appraise the multiplicity of diverse thoughts, considerations, and interests which would interplay with the changes to be made. From this viewpoint, one might marvel that any

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changes in the piracy situation were accomplished at all. To the American book interests that awoke every morning poorer because of lost royalty revenue, the month after month after month that passed without positive, remedial, reportable action dragged on interminably. To them the long periods of apparent inaction by the GRC represented nothing short of calculated and gross unconcern for the international thievery that it thus condoned. Whichever of the two views one chooses to take with regard to the promptness or slowness of response, action did indeed occur. Chronologically the first major step taken by the GRC against the pirates has already been reported here. It was the authorization for registration of the Encyclopedia Britannica in the late summer of 1959. This registration was not an inconsiderable matter to the GRC as it required agreement among authorities in several of the ministries; it required decision-makers to think in ways new to China regarding the fundamental purposes of registration and censorship examination; and it was taken in opposition to some wealthy and powerful interests in Taiwan. The period was one of great and often painful soulsearching for the participants, and the ultimate judgment—although it may have appeared minor in the eyes of some American observers—had enormous impact and bore the great weight of important precedent on its shoulders. Concurrent with EB deliberations in the executive Yuan of the GRC, there was also extensive expenditure of effort in the legislative Yuan to draft new regulations for enforcing China's copyright law. Embassy and other American officials had long been informed when they sought redress in piracy cases that the legislative Yuan was working on a revision of the enforcement regulations, but the American publishing industry remained dubious that if and when new legislation was passed it could be helpful to them. The long-awaited revision of the Regulations for the Enforcement of the Copyright Law of the Republic of China was finally promulgated as of August 10, 1959. Translations were made immediately and rushed home by the American

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Embassy, where the Department of State distributed copies into the eager hands of industry representatives. By this time, however, the American industry had waited so long for relief from the piracy problem that it would probably not have been appeased by anything short of an exact copy of the United States law. Certainly the few modest improvements incorporated into the new law were not adequate to satisfy them. Upon careful examination it appeared that substantive alterations had been made only in two places. A new Article 10 for the first time made it clear that foreign language books could indeed by copyrighted by registration and? the payment of fees—-a question which had been in dispute earlier in the year with respect to the Encyclopedia Britannica. And a new Article 13 authorized local government officials to seize books printed in violation of copyright and to take other "effective administrative measures." These were steps in the right direction, but they were certainly not enough to make the American industry happy. Furthermore, the new regulations retained as Article 8, Section 1, the controversial requirement that the "registration fee for a literary work shall be ten (10) times that of the list price of the work in question" or five times in the case of an adopted textbook. One American publisher, after studying the revised law, expressed as follows the frustration felt by the entire industry: ! What we need at this time, and for some time to come, is practical copyright protection in Formosa. Irrespective of the State Department's viewpoint, I feel that U.C.C. acceptance by Formosa can solve the problem easily and in accordance with international procedure and practice. This means a revision of their laws to coincide with the U.C.C. agreement. The current laws are inadequate and we all know it. What can we do about it now? Most annoying to the American publishing community was the gnawing recognition that it could really do nothing at all to force Chinese accession to the UCC principle. Such accession could

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only come over a period of time with enlightened Chinese self-interest. As in the case of the EB decision, the GRC was proud of its revision of the enforcement regulations. It felt that, since it would patently increase the costs of some books in Taiwan, it would be recognized widely as an act of magnanimity, a concession to world opinion, and a manifestation of good faith. Such, however, was not to be the case, because few persons beyond the diplomatic level saw it in these terms. The American publishing community certainly did not, and through its effective access to the public press the industry largely determined the course of American public thinking in the matter. It was shortly after the EB decision and revision of the enforcement regulations, both favorable to United States book interests, that Chinese government officials first learned of the IMG termination, and many felt that it represented somewhat shabby treatment. In response simply to the American Embassy's explanations of the grievances of Western publishers, the Republic of China had just concluded two actions which i t felt to be substantial peacemaking steps, only to be slapped immediately with actual termination of aid for not having done more. There was understandable bitterness in some Chinese circles over this apparent lack of appreciation for the difficult improvement of the recent past and now the international "blackmail" of aid suspension to force still more concessions. Bitterness or no bitterness, however, the Republic of China simply had in 1959 to retain United States aid; this was a very real and undeniable fact of national survival. It was not yet able at that time to determine alone its economic future, so the GRC suppressed its pride—not easily done anywhere but especially difficult in the Orient—and began searching for additional ways of mollifying American interests concerning book piracy. While they were searching, the case broke of quantity book exportation to Ames, Iowa. Several times previously the American Embassy had queried GRC officials as to

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how they rationalized allowing the pirates to ship books off; the island of Taiwan. If indeed it were true, the Embassy ihad reasoned, that the Chinese would not sign the UCC only so that the Chinese people could have cheap reprints, this could hardly be valid ground for permitting the reprints then to be exported. Now that the great hue-and-cry about exportation arose following the Ames incident, the Embassy again raised the stale argument. The logic of the point, plus the increase of j sincere concern in Taiwan for the piracy issue, plus the fear Ithat the United States might further curtail all-important financial aid to China, weighed heavily upon Ministry officials in Taipei as they pondered the problem of exportation of their low-priced reprints. Again their deliberations were complicated by the fact that the export trade was an extremely lucrative one, and large monied interests pressed government officials hard to retain the profitable status quo. The weight of world opinion, however, won out over money, and on March 23, 1960, the GRC made the most momentous decision it has ever made regarding its book industry. The following day Dan Lacy, Managing Director of the American Book Publishers Council, distributed a terse bulletin to members of the Council and of the Joint Foreign Trade Committee. "Word has just been received," he wrote, "thati the cabinet of the Chinese Nationalist Government has issued a decree banning the export from Formosa of all reprinted bdoks in all foreign languages. Further details will be supplied as they become available." Details of the decision turned up the following day in The New York Times. Orders banning exportation from Taiwan of foreign-language reprints had indeed been issued by the executive Yuan's Foreign Trade and Exchange Control Commission. Enforcement of the regulation was assigned by the order to the Bank of Taiwan, the Customs Service, and the Post Office. Despite the order, the Times was quick to point out, the GRC did not intend soon to join the UCC. "Government

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sources in Taipei," it added, "said there were many problems and considerations involved in that decision, but they refused to elaborate." The news of the export ban by the executive Yuan came concurrent with extensive discussion in the legislative Yuan of the need for copyright law revision, and the combined publicity given to the two actions created for the first time in Taiwan widespread public awareness of the piracy issue. The China Post, the island's only English-language newspaper at that time, carried long articles on piracy in its issues of March 25, 27, 28, 29, 30, and April 2, 3, 6, 7, 9, and 10. Indeed the April 7 issue of the paper carried no less than two long press releases, a letter to the editor, and thirty-six column inches of editorial on piracy. The vernacular press also devoted considerable space to the subject, manifesting clearly the ferment of public concern there for the controversy. Most of the Taipei publicity concerning piracy was favorable to United States interests. The legislative Yuan summoned some thirty local book dealers, authors, and publishers to a meeting on March 26 for an exchange of views on a proposed revision of the copyright law. Vice-Minister of Interior Chi Yuan-Pu opened the meeting with a warning that if book piracy were not stopped in time, "the consequences would be very serious," and he expressed the desire for new legislation that would offer protection to authors and copyright owners. Prominent author Chen Chi-Yin stated that he had heard Taipei reprints of Western books referred to sarcastically as "the most famous special product of Taiwan" and that he felt shamed by such comments; he urged that the new law contain severe penalties for piracy. On March 28 Minister of Interior Tien ChiungChin quoted publicly from the Baltimore Sun editorial of two days previous which had extolled the propaganda value to the United States of cheap Chinese reprints but, he added quickly, "our book dealers should not use this as an excuse for pirating American books and selling them in the United States." This

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latter point need no longer have been made, of course, since exportation had been banned five days earlier. The Interior Minister, who himself held a Ph.D. degree from the University of Illinois, expressed hope that "our book dealers would take the initiative" in negotiating an agreement with American publishers wherein low-priced reprints of their books could be made in Taiwan. This view was publicly echoed on March 31 by noted political commentator Tao Hsi-Sheng. This agitation spawned charges andj countercharges, rumors and half-truths, rejoinders, and surrejoinders. On April 2 a statement was published, attributed to Director of Police Administration Huang Yu, giving the impression that the MOI was about to impound all unauthorized reprints in Taiwan. This rumor, which could only have been that, since there was no law under which such seizure could be made, may have resulted from a police order two days earlier requiring all Taipei booksellers to supply an inventory of the American books which they had reproduced in the several years preceding. The order bred understandable apprehension within the trade that such a list might well be preliminary to more drastic police action. It may have been, of course, that Police Director Huang's statement was intentionally publicized in exaggerated form in order to galvanize the local book trade into sjome kind of defensive action to counter the rapidly developing consensus against piracy. If that were its purpose, it was remarkably successful, because the trade rose up immediately and to a man to assure that its bookstocks would not suffer confiscation. They retained an attorney, Li Chin-Fang, to represent their interest; they held a news conference of their own; and on April 4 they addressed a long, lucid, open letter to United States Ambassador Everett F. Drumwright presenting their case in the matter. Spokesman for the Taipei book trade in the press conference and author of its letter was Sun Kuo-Jen of Rainbow-Bridge Book Company. The interesting Mr. Sun, although never having been in the United States, had nonetheless studied carefully the English language instruction books he

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purveyed, and he spoke and wrote English as though he were born and reared in Omaha. This facility, coupled with his rapier-quick mind, blunt outspokenness, and effervescent sense of humor, plus many years of experience as a Customs official during which he had learned thoroughly the labyrinthine ways of accomplishing one's ends in a bureaucracy, made him the ideal person to state the local trade's position. Mr. Sun's letter, signed not only by himself but by eight of his colleagues in the trade as well, was a good one. The points made in it have all been presented at one place or another in this monograph, so they will not be repeated here. It amounted, however, to a position paper for the Taiwan trade. It began with a reminder that Chinese students could not afford books at Western prices and that for Taiwan reprinters to make them available for less was in no way illegal in China unless they had been duly registered with the MOI. It explained that time and again, when Chinese bookdealers had sought reprint authorization from American publishers, they were either refused or their appeals had brought no reply. It pledged to defend its bookstocks against illegal seizure by the police while reaffirming the trade's "readiness to work together with any American publisher toward an amicable solution of the problem." In closing, the straight-talking Mr. Sun queried the Ambassador as to the veracity of rumors that American aid was being used as a lever to pry copyright concessions from the GRC. Again it was the Director of Police, Huang Yu, who got the blame for rumor-mongering. Mr. Huang, according to Mr. Sun's letter: told us in person on April 2 that the United States is "cutting back aid funds to the Republic of China because of unauthorized reprinting of American books in Taiwan." While we do not doubt the authenticity of a clearcut statement from a responsible official of our Government, we cannot believe that Your Excellency and your Government would use American aid as both the carrot and the stick to

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deprive the 30,000 college students in Taiwan of the source of cheap textbooks. The text of the letter was released to the press, and there it was, squarely put before the world: Would the United States really terminate aid to this end? It was Director Huang's lot to have publicly to deny the rumor. In the China Post for April 7 he disclaimed even mentioning United States aid during his meeting with the trade. "I am not an official in charge of U.S. aid," lie said. "There was no reason whatsoever for me to mention that." At the same time, the Minister of the Interior was having to deny the other rumor attributed to his hapless Police Director: namely, that the police were preparing to impound unauthorized reprints: I have no knowledge of such a claim [avowed Minister Tien] and I doubt if Director Huang has ever made such a statement. While we are not planning to confiscate those reprinted books already on the local markets, we are also trying our best to make it possible for textbooks to be reproduced here in the future for sale to Chinese students through negotations between local publishers and foreign copyright owners. So much therefore for the denials. It should not be assumed that all voices heard in this Donnybrook supported the American position. Letters to the editor decried the high prices of Western books. Thi Taipei newspapers reprinted almost the entire Baltimore Sun editorial within thirty-six hours of its appearance in the Maryland city. Surely, opined Western interests, such an editorial aided and abetted the enemy! Tao Po-Chuan, leading member of the control Yuan, China's supreme watchdog organ, reminded the public that the reproduction of Western books in Taiwan "does not constitute a legal problem since China is not a party to the

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International Copyright Convention," and he warned the GRC not to issue any capricious or arbitrary orders making the police ban the sale of such books. Dr. Hsieh Min-Shan, respected dean of the Chung-Yuan College of Science and Engineering, issued a public plea on behalf of Chinese students pointing out that they would be in great difficulty if the sale of Taipei facsimile textbooks were to be outlawed by police action. In the midst of all this frenetic concern on the part of the Taiwan trade, the Taipei District Court handed down a verdict on April 8, 1960, convicting five persons for book piracy. The first, a professional book pirate, was sentenced to a year in prison and fined N.T. $1,500 (U.S. $37.50); three others were imprisoned for ten months and fined N.T. $900 apiece; and the last—a distributor only—was fined N.T. $1,500. Word of the convictions appeared the following day in The New York Times, and it inspired some in the American industry to think that perhaps the days of book piracy in Formosa were really coming to an end, although many old Chinawatchers were frankly doubtful. Their doubts were confirmed when the full story became known several days later and it was determined that the convictions had been for pirating copyrighted Chinese books and that no Western reprints had been involved. During the peak din of this skirmish with the pirates at least two American publisher's representatives were present in Taipei. Between April 1 and April 10 Norman J. Wright of Henry M. Snyder & Company, and Rudolph Coons of D. Van Nostrand were moving in and out of the bookstores and appropriate government offices, asking questions of the pirates and generally raising the level of anxiety even higher than it would have been otherwise. Their reports home represent masterful reporting of the fever pitch to which concern had risen. Describing the two-day period between the rumor and the denial that the police were to confiscate reprints, Mr. Wright wrote: All retail stores were given long forms on which they had to list every pirated book in stock. They

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were to be taken off sale until a "royalty arrangement" could be made. . . . Consequently, as I walked down the street, I saw that every bookstore had the blue-bound pirated copies piled on the floor, listing and counting them. On several occasions I saw peddicabs containing fat little Chinese women and all that the peddicab could hold of the Merriam Unabridged Dictionary, darting frantically on their mission of getting rid of books as fast as possible. For example, the Michener Hawaii had been selling for about U.S. $1.75. Last week it was selling for 45^ in the booksellers' attempt to get rid of as many as possible before the police swooped in. Somehow the three-week battle ended as suddenly as it had begun, and when the smoke cleared and the results were calculated, it appeared that American interests had won a partial victory only, but a very important one; nonetheless. Exportation of books from Taiwan was now clearly illegal, but piracy on the island was still permissible if the copyright owner failed to register his right with the MOI. And the registration fee remained at ten times the price of the book—still too high to attract the interest of American publishers. There was now widespread concern and understanding of the issue in China, and five booksellers had received the severest penalties anyone could remember having been levied for piracy, although of Chinese books. Furthermore, the legislative Yuan had gained a wealth of commentary pro and con to aid its deliberations on a new copyright law. If only the Government of the Republic of China could make its book export ban stick and thereby contain piracy to the island, Americans felt, the continuing struggle to cope with it would have assumed much more manageable proportions and the three weeks would have been well spent. But that was a big IF.

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And Never the Twain . . . .. Negotiations Flounder In his April 10, 1960, report from the Orient to his home office, D. Van Nostrand's Rudolph Coons expressed his "admiration for the speedy action which our State Department got in securing the ban on export of pirated editions outside Formosa." But, he added, "it is to be hoped that enforcement of this ban will receive similar support." Old China hands in the book industry almost unanimously shared a jaundiced view of the likelihood of enforcement. In reporting the export embargo, Publishers' Weekly on April 4 expressed its doubts that the blockades would be taken seriously: The effectiveness of this enforcement remains, of course; to be seen. American publishers who voiced skepticism about the policing of the new law noted that the South China Sea has been an area rife with piracy of one sort or another for many centuries. It is problematical whether Formosan authorities will be effective in stopping the export of pirated editions to Far Eastern and Southeast Asian markets. The same dubious attitude pervaded the entire American book community. Feelings in the Taiwan book industry, however, were mixed. Several firms—notably Southeast (through its subsidiaries), Far East, Tan Chiang, Eurasia, and Universal—had been caught by the suddenness of the export ban. They had tooled up and produced for the export market which was now cut off from them, and their warehouses were full of newly minted books in editions much larger than the island of Taiwan could absorb alone. If they were going to abide by the ban, huge

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chunks of their capital would be tied up in stocks of books which would be essentially unsalable. Here indeed would be great irony: the other developing countries of the Orient were desperate for inexpensive sources of information while;the Taiwan warehouses were full of cheap facsimile textbooksj doomed to be pulped because it was illegal to move them. As the proprietors of the large reprint firms surveyed the wreckage of the industry which they had soj recently built, they reacted in different ways. Several frankly faced the fact that exportation was now illegal, took their losses, and reverted to making much smaller profits in the legitimate supplying of the domestic markets. Others, while refusing personally to export, found themselves delivering with no-questions-asked large quantity invoices to distribution fronts which had no visible markets anywhere on the island. Still others continued blatantly to export, although this last group was small. Mr. Coons, for example, in his letter of April 10 told of his discussion with perhaps the most notorious Taiwan pirate, who was outspoken and vehement in defense of his right to reprint without permission or payment. "You will never succeed in stopping it," he asserted. Twice I caught him saying that he has had a perfect right to export and is doing so right along; each time I asked him if he was still exporting after the ban of March 23rd—and each time he backed down, saying no, not since March 23rd (but without great conviction of tone). . . . Subsequent developments have indicated that this particular pirate did not at that time discontinue exporting books and indeed may not have done so yet. Under pressure from the several GRC ministries most involved, the period became one of negotiation, as the Taipei booksellers tried again and again to work out arrangements by which they could gain authorization to reprint American books. Grand schemes, panaceas, and comprehensive pro-

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posals to resolve the issue, of course, were nothing new. Almost everyone involved had at one time or another been his own panacea-maker, but efforts had uniformly come to naught. Proposals had much more frequently been framed by Asians than by Americans. Whereas before, however, efforts to negotiate had been limited almost entirely to individual booksellers who sought to gain rights for their respective firms, there was now some incipient concerted activity on the part of the entire Taiwan book industry. The first indication of their banding together on the reprint problem was their press conference of April 2 and their open letter to the United States Ambassador on April 4, 1960. Although that letter had been signed by only nine of twenty-nine known pirates, the signers represented the largest and most powerful firms. Many of the smaller reprinters, it must be remembered, produced only one or two books a year and were totally ignorant of the meaning of the problem. The first major comprehensive proposal was put forth by an aggregation of major booksellers calling themselves the Taipei Book and Educational Supplies Association. It was their proposal that was presented cold to American industry representatives when they called on the Chinese Embassy in Washington on September 13, 1960. Although there can be little doubt that the timing of the proposal and the way in which it was produced out of thin air as it were, and without warning, was carefully calculated to upset the balance of the American visitors, it also constituted a serious effort on the part of the Taipei book trade to get something moving on the issue. This document presented a rather simple plan for the wholesale legitimization of the Taipei industry. It proposed that all negotiations for reprint authorization in Taiwan should be concluded through the so-called Taipei Book and Educational Supplies Association. American publishers were not to "reject applications for reproduction submitted by the Association" and were to "receive royalties at a certain percent of the amount in New Taiwan Currency accruing from the pro-

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ceeds of the actual sale." Royalties would be paid on books already produced on the basis of the volume of sales!from the date of concluding the agreement being proposed. Registrations with the MOI would be filed by the Association. Regardless of what else the proposal accomplished, it had put the American industry deputation off its stride. It went home promising to study the proposal and to supply a counterscheme as soon as possible. Following a careful review of the document by the Joint International Trade Committee, its chairman, Warren Sullivan, replied for the industry a month later. His letter of October 12, 1960, addressed to Dr. Yi-Seng Kiang, First Minister of the Embassy of the Republic of China, was conciliatory in tone and optimistic in outlook. Rather than being a counterproposal, however, the letter was a simple response to several specific matters in the original proposal. Mr. Sullivan's opening observation was that "the general terms of the agreement, subject to such reservations or comments as are hereafter mentioned, are satisfactory, and we hope that they will lead the way toward mutually satisfactory publishing relations between our countries." He pointed out, however, that the American Book Publishers Council and the American Textbook Publishers Institute could not control the actions of their members so as to meet the stipulation that all American firms would accept all requests for authorization— and only those—that were made through the Taipei Association. The Council and Institute could recommend policy to their members, but they could not enforce it. "There may be circumstances," Mr. Sullivan stated, "in which the American publisher would find it impossible to grant rights because he had already assigned them elsewhere. For example, he might have sold reprint rights to a Japanese publisher for a marketing area that included China." The proposed royalty rate was satisfactory so long as provision was included for the full conversion of payments into U.S. dollars. He requested a list of the members of

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the Taipei Association and pointed out that guarantees would need to be included in any agreement that would assure the policing of nonmember Taiwan publishers as well as members. He assumed that the Association was seeking reprint rights for sale in China only. In concluding, Mr. Sullivan stated that ultimate adherence to the UCC by China was still considered the most desirable solution by the American industry, but "in the interim," he allowed, "an agreement along the lines we are considering here will be fruitful." There can be no doubt that some American publishers had misgivings about the plan. Fear was widespread, for example, that the proffered periodic royalty reports of certain Taipei booksellers would contain fictitious sales figures and that payment would therefore be made on only partial editions. Indeed an ancient and almost honorable Oriental tradition would seem to come near forcing the falsification of such royalty reports; it was the widespread custom among many Asian business firms of maintaining two sets of account books—one correct set and a second one showing considerably less business activity for the benefit of the tax collector. Taxes, in fact, have been known in some cases to be set higher than was necessary because officials recognized that they would only be able to collect on incomplete reports anyway. If any Taiwan booksellers were reporting short to the tax collector therefore, they would certainly not then buy official currency exchange for royalty payment on the correct level of sales. This would in effect be creating one paper document testifying to the falsification of another paper document, and the Taiwan industry was much too smart to do a thing like that. If they falsified one, they would certainly falsify the second to agree with it. Nonetheless, despite these and other similar doubts as to the workability of the scheme, the ABPC-ATPI reaction to the Taiwanese proposal was hopeful, cordial, and sincere. Regrettably, however, nothing ever came of the negotiations. For all practical purposes they ended then and there, and the reason for their termination is unclear. One can

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speculate with some confidence that the reason was a j lack of adequate consensus and cooperation within the Taiwan book industry. Cooperation is never easy to attain in Asian countries, where one's responsibilities are often thought of as being to his family and business and to little else. Allegiance to an industry —or to a profession, or a place, or a society—is seldom strong, and promising cooperative efforts of many kinds have often broken down in their early stages as participants dissipated their energies maneuvering for positions of personal power or profit to the detriment of their colleagues. Because of the poor records which cooperative enterprises have posted in the Orient, few people there place much faith in them; usually therefore they are weak and short-lived. Such appears to have been true in the case of the proposal of the Taipei Book and Educational Supplies Association. Minister Kiang was unable even to acknowledge Mr. Sullivan's counterproposal until five months after it had been received, and when his reply was filed it was a great disappointment to the American industry. Although he agreed that Taiwan publishers were interested in gaining authorization to print only for the Taiwan market and that royalty payments could be converted into U.S. dollars, he could offer little else. As regards the Taipei Book and Educational Supplies Association, he reported that it is now in the process of reorganization and when completed is expected to have a combined membership of more than one thousand (1,000) individuals and concerns. The list is not available at the present time. No more mention of a Taiwan booksellers' association was to be forthcoming for five years. Old China hands said "We told you so." Little occurred in subsequent months to encourage American publishers to hope for an early resolution to the piracy problem. The status quo continued on all fronts. For a time the American industry retained a Taipei attorney to act in a

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sense as its lobbyist to guide improvements in the situation through the halls of the Chinese government. Among improvements encouraged upon him by his American clients were reduction in the fee for the registration of books with the MOI; severer penalties for pirates; stricter enforcement of the book export ban; and other similar actions. Despite his competent and extensive efforts, however, nothing changed. The American industry once again took its plea for action to the Congress. On September 7, 1962, Edward E. Booher, president of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, testified for the ABPC and the ATPI before the Senate Appropriations Committee studying foreign aid appropriations. His message was the same as had been delivered by the industry before, and in its published report the Committee made the same reference to the problem as it had made before, "The Department of State is requested to continue efforts. . . ," it began. One thing that was changing, however, was the incidence of piracy. Relentlessly and continuously the number of Western books in print in Taiwan editions grew and grew, until it stood in the fall of 1962 fully at 2,000. The impudence of the infamous pirate firm, Far East Book Company, manifested itself again when its winter 1961 Catalogue of Books appeared and it displayed as its cover the colophon of the Viking Press. This well-known device, a Viking ship scudding before the wind, had been drawn for the Press by Rockwell Kent at the time of its founding. Since it was a registered trademark, the Press consulted its attorneys to determine if legal action would be desirable, and it dispatched seven hundred photo-offset copies of the device to the Customs Bureau to aid in its efforts to intercept parcels of pirated books. When it was later determined that the emblem had also been used by such other Taipei firms as Far East's subsidiary, the American Book Company, and Literature House, the Viking Press gave up the idea of attempting litigation in the case. In late 1962 the American book industry decided that the time had come to put China's copyright law to the

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test. Chinese officials had since the 1959 revision been claiming that there was now adequate protection available in Taiwan to the American publishers who would take the trouble to register their books with the Ministry of Interior. McGraw-Hill had registered two of its most important titles—Paul A. Samuelson's Economics, An Introductory Analysis on April 16, 1962, and The Encyclopedia of Science and Technology on June 21, 1961. The problem to McGraw-Hill was not only one of cumbersome negotiations but of substantial cost as well. It cost thd firm $160 to register the Samuelson book, and the latter title, a ten-volume set which retailed in the United States at $175, cost; $1,750 in registration fee alone. In addition McGraw-Hill paid out $950 in attorney's fees to get the registration made and was required to deposit two copies of the work. The complaint by American firms that registration was prohibitively expensive was amply demonstrated by the case of this Encyclopedia which thus cost almost $3,000 all told. Eventually both Samuelson's Economics and the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology wen; pirated. McGraw-Hill's Taipei attorney, Ruchin Tsar, first! instituted legal proceedings in the case of the former title. Mr. Tsar, who had come to Taiwan from the China Mainland where he had attended Soochow University, was a very gracious yet competent and forceful attorney. He had served many Amejrican firms and causes, and he was a good choice to handle this first test case involving piracy of a registered foreign book. Mr. Tsar on July 18, 1962, filed a written complaint with the MOI that Taipei bookstores had pirated the Samuelson book. The police, apprised of the complaint in due time, raided four stores on October 3 and seized twenty-one pirated copies from two of them as evidence; they raided again on October 23 but found nothing. On November 29 the Taipei District Court handed down indictments against the two booksellers. They were Hsiao Sheng-Meng of the same Book World Company that had first pirated the Encyclopaedia Britannica in Taiwan, and Liu Ching-Ti of the Lucy Bookstore, now wife of

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Southeast's Choh Chin-Shin, the second Taiwan reprinter of the EB. On January 19, 1963, the Court found the defendants guilty as charged, and they were sentenced accordingly. Mr. and Mrs. Hsiao were fined N.T. $300 apiece (totaling U.S. $15), and Miss Liu was fined N.T. $600. Although the fines do not appear monetarily to have fitted the crime, the meaning of the conviction cannot be calculated in dollars alone. One Chinese observer pointed out shortly after the case had been concluded that The significance of this judgment is not to be measured in terms of the severeness of the sentence, but rather in the light of the authoritative condemnation of the act of book piracy by the court. Likewise the pain suffered by the book pirates is not to be measured in the amount of the fine, but rather in terms of the dishonor and inconvenience they have received. The Foreign Exchange and Trade Control Commission of the GRC shortly thereafter suspended the foreign exchange transaction rights of the two convicted bookstores, and the Book World Company subsequently left the business of reprinting books entirely. The case, however, was not to end there. The convicted booksellers appealed their case to the Taiwan High Court where during the spring they argued that the District Court judgment should be set aside for lack of evidence. The defendants produced their business records showing that there were neither invoices nor vouchers for Samuelson's Economics. Pleading for the prosecution, Mr. Tsar promptly refuted that since the defendants were aware that the sale of the reprint was an illicit business, they would naturally avoid the use of legitimate invoices and vouchers for it, and that the lack of such documents was not conclusive evidence of their not having been sold; that the discovery and seizure of pirated editions on display at their places of business created a presumption of guilt

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which shifted the burden of proof to the defendants to prove with evidence their innocence. In this case, however, the appellate court on May 15 found for the defendants on insufficiency of evidence and overturned the lower court's judgment. Morale plummeted when news of the acquittal reached the New York publishing community. Some bitterly assumed that there had been a deliberate miscarriage! of justice —and such there may have been—but in defense of the appellate court decision it must be pointed out that there are no such elaborate rules of evidence in Chinese law as there are in the West and that the probative value of evidence is therefore decided in the light of the judge's "moral convictions" born of his "daily experience and logic." Regardless of the legitimacy of the judgment, however, the likelihood of further negotiations between the American and Taiwan book industries was much reduced by it. The general feeling in the American industry was that serious discussions were no longer possible because, without practical legal protection of their rights, American firms would be negotiating under duress. j It also appeared at the time that attorney Tsar had fared little better in his case against the pirate of the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology. Its registration had almost wholly removed the pirated edition from the open shelves of the Taipei bookstores, but it was available almost everywhere clandestinely. Mr. Tsar filed a written complaint of the piracy on November 5, 1962, and the police made several raids on three Taipei bookstores but found nothing. Eventually Mr. Tsar himself was allegedly able to purchase a set in fifteen volumes from Miss C. C. Tang of the University Book Store near the campus of National Taiwan University. He reported paying N.T. $1,600 (U.S. $40) for the Encyclopedia and was able to get a receipt for the sale. On March 13, 1963, the Taipei District Procuratorate preferred indictment against Miss Tang on two counts: (1) book piracy, and (2) forgery for selling books bearing the names of the editors without their consent. The Taipei District Court, however, on May 22

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found for the defendant who argued that the receipt she had written was not for a pirated set but for a second-hand set of the Western edition of the Encyclopedia which she was disposing of at the request of an unidentified third party. The implication of the judgment was that a receipt for a pirated book could only be admitted in evidence if it stated that the book being sold was a pirated edition. This acquittal came only two days after the successful appeal by the defendants in the Samuelson case, and poor Mr. Tsar had to deliver both items of bad news to his New York client in the same letter. Again the most experienced New York heads wagged knowingly. Now, however, it was the prosecution's turn to appeal. Mr. Tsar filed immediately for an appeal in the Encyclopedia case, which then remained pending for a long time before the Taiwan High Court. On June 30, 1964, the High Court finally reversed the decision of the District Court in the matter and fined the defendant 400 silver dollars (U.S. $30). It should be noted in this connection that, although it has since been increased to two years imprisonment, the maximum punishment for copyright infringement under the law at that time was only 500 silver dollars. Thus the punishment meted to Miss Tang was in its context considered quite severe. The possibility of appealing the Samuelson case, however, was vague. It was not really possible to appeal a decision of the Taiwan High Court where the defendants had been acquitted, unless the case were a felony, which it was not. The only recourse left was for the Procurator General, if he were convinced that the judgment was in obvious contravention of the law, to bring an extraordinary appeal before the Supreme Court, and this would obviously be a very serious move. Nonetheless, and despite its severity, such action was under consideration for a long time. The GRC was greatly embarrassed by the two nearly concurrent acquittals, and the executive Yuan ordered the Procurator General to study carefully the possibility Of taking the Samuelson case before the Supreme Court. The matter was several times discussed in the Cabinet but, as the

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United States, China has an independent judiciary system, and rather delicate handling of the case was required. Pressure for the extraordinary appeal was eventually much relieved by the High Court's favorable ruling on the Encyclopedia case in mid1964. The two cases did not settle much. It! now appeared that American publishers had some protection,) although not as much as they would have liked. They continued to hold the opinion that they could not authorize Chinese reprinting without guarantees that piracy would end. The GRC, on the other hand, continued to refuse to outlaw piracy without guarantees that cheap reprints would continue to be available. Several years slipped by with this impasse remaining the same.

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<m 9

With Opium and Gold: The Smuggling of Books

If only the GRC could contain the distribution of pirated reprints to the island of Taiwan. . . . Few outside observers felt it could do so, and indeed many Chinese themselves felt that the export embargo was simply a paper concession to American pressure which was never intended to be fully enforced. The profits in book exportation were large, and the penalties for violation of the ban were slight, so there was incentive for the practice to continue. Almost all officials of the GRC, however, took the ban very seriously. The order which placed foreign-language books on the export control list was issued by the Foreign Exchange and Trade Control Commission on March 23, 1960, and was ratified by the Cabinet on the day following. On March 25 the Inspectorate General of Customs issued to the Customs Offices at the ports of Keelung in the north and the down-island harbor of Kaohsiung, as well as in the air terminals at Taipei and Tainan, instructions to seize books that were not properly cleared for export. This order involved the examination of the baggage of all outgoing passengers, as is the normal practice in Taiwan, and of outgoing packages at the time customs declarations were made prior to their final sealing. On April 19 the Directorate General of Posts ordered the Postmasters to seize and return to the sender any foreign-language books being mailed to an overseas address. It was recognized that a likely loophole existed here, however, because of the difficulty of detecting packages of books unless they were unusually large shipments, and it was believed that most book shipments were small. Although the United States

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Post Office released word on April 8 that it had already intercepted fifteen packages of books originating in Taiwan, raising apprehension in the States that the ban was not being enforced, it is clear that they were mailed prior even to the initial order of March 23 and certainly before the Taiwan postal embargo was instituted on April 19. Little has been said to this time about the substantial sale of pirated English-language reprints to American personnel resident and transient in Taiwan. United States servicemen and their families, employees of government agencies, contractors, and others in the private sector, missionaries, and tourists, all constituted an enormous English reading market, and the number of best-sellers reprinted on the island rose rapidly to fill their demands alone. Several well-stocked bestseller bookstores were soon established on Chungsljan Road North near the American compound and close to the President and Grand Hotels which are popular with American transients. Far from limiting their buying, however, to popular trade books, this group had also been purchasing many of the bargain-priced text and reference volumes to be taken or sent back to the United States. An effective export ban would have to! take this group of resident American nationals into account as wfell as the native Taiwanese,, and in April the GRC advised the United States Army Postal Office (APO) to take such steps as appeared necessary to keep printed books from the APO mails. An instruction was immediately issued by the Commander of the United States Taiwan Defense Command instructing U.S. personnel concerning the nonmailable nature of publications that violated American copyrights and warning of the severe penalties that could be imposed for mailing such matter. It forbade the use of military postal facilities for the shipment of pirated books from Taiwan, and it ordered officers who were authorized to certify gifts and to sign customs declarations not to sign for any packages containing such literature. The American Embassy distributed a similar advisory document to all

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United States government agencies in Taiwan. With these measures the volume of book exportation from the island began rapidly to dwindle. Exportation did not end entirely, but what remained was driven underground. The GRC invited submission of hard evidence of contravention of the ban so that it could take action against smugglers, but such evidence was difficult to come by. There were some efforts by Western book interests at entrapment. In March; Joseph Marks of Doubleday ordered and received by mail a copy of Webster's Unabridged Dictionary from Tan Chiang, but the package was postmarked in Taipei on March 23, a day prior to ratification of the ban. Some fifty pirated reprints were received from Tan Chiang on the Iowa State University campus on April 22, but they too had been shipped prior to the ban. In general, suspicious-looking packages being shipped from Taiwan to American addresses were soon being quite carefully and effectively screened by GRC agencies. It soon appeared, however, that the same degree of scrutiny was not being given in the Chinese customs and mails to packages being shipped elsewhere in the world. Hong Kong especially turned up as a frequent recipient of Taiwan reprints and was in fact rather often used by smugglers in the early days of the ban as a mail drop for illicit transshipments to United States patrons. A typical example of this subterfuge was supplied to the ABPC-ATPI by the storied Hong Kong investigator, F. W. Kendall, who had been retained by the Council and Institute to watchdog the Hong Kong scene. On July 19, 1960, he furnished photographs of a package of pirated Taiwan books that had come into his possession bearing a mail cancellation stamp reading "Taiwan 28-6-60 Keelung," indicating that it had been posted in the Formosan port city more than two months after the postal ban had been promulgated. The return address was "331 Kung Leung Road, Keelung," but it was written on a slip of paper pasted onto the package, which, when

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removed, revealed beneath it the name and address of [Taiwan's best known pirate-smuggler, Far East Book Company, j Hong Kong was ideally situated in several respects to serve conspiratorially for Taipei book smugglers. On August 10, 1963, the London trade paper Bookseller carried another report on the subject from the intrepid Mr. Kendall. He wrote: The fact remains that ships' crews on vessels plying between Taiwan and Hongkong are ostensibly the most educated seamen in the world. In one classic case Ito my certain knowledge, each member of a ship's crew ntimbering 36, brought into Hongkong a complete set iof the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Multiply this by 20 to 30 sailings a month and you reach a healthy aggregate. This is by no means the only way of importing books. A recent seizure made by Hongkong Customs authorities involved a number of packing cases manifested as salt vegetables. These in fact contained over 1,000 pirated books including Oxford dictionaries. This particular shipment of smuggled books had arrived in Hong Kong aboard the Hai An out of Keelung and Was consigned,- strangely enough but in the best Oriental tradition, to a Kowloon jade broker. j Taiwan books were not being smuggled into Hong Kong alone. In August 1962 there was considerable concern about their extensive sale in Australia where they turned up in use at a government installation and at several universities. Apparently their distribution there was rather widespread, especially in Auckland. They also went in large numbers to Macao which, as Hong Kong, served as an ideal mail drop for transshipment. One Macao operative was closed out by GRC action in June of 1963. A certain Mr. Chan was alleged to have been using a Taipei Post Office Box for the illegal exportation of pirated books through a Macao cohort, but the GRC had only

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circumstantial evidence of his activities. It therefore had the Post Office cancel his P.O. Box, and word was soon passed that Mr. Chan was losing money because of his inability to receive and fulfill book orders from foreign countries. Any place, of course, and anyone could serve as a mail drop, and Publishers' Weekly on August 20, 1962, quoted a letter received from a Taipei pirate in response to an order from the United States. The bookseller regretted that the U.S. Customs Dept. announced recently they would not allow our friends' shipment of books into U.S.A. We hope you can give us your relatives' or friends' address not in U.S. (such as Canada, South America, Europe or some other places outside U.S.A.), so that we may . . . send your books to them, and when they receive the books, they send them to you. We believe by this way you will receive your books. . . . We think this is the excellent way. . . . Could this have been written with tongue-in-cheek? Probably not. ,: The rapidly growing higher education industry in Korea made that country a good market for smuggled reprints, too. In mid-1963 Henry M. Snyder & Company's East Asian representative reported that Korea was "flooded" with Taiwan piracies, and although the term "flooded" may be subject to differing interpretations, there is no question but that some such books went there in the early days of the ban. The S.S. President Lincoln, for example, arrived in Pusan Harbor in mid-July 1963 carrying eleven cases of Taiwan books consigned to a firm in Seoul, and it was alleged, although never verified, that the books were pirated reprints. This gossip prompted closer surveillance of the trade in Korea, and several months later it was rumored that an "industrial company" in Seoul had ordered 6,568 books to be delivered by the same Taipei shipper. Upon learning of the rumor, GRC officials confirmed that such a shipment was scheduled to leave Keelung on the S.S. Washington Bear of the Pacific Far East Lines. A special joint inspection detail was dispatched

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from Taipei to Keelung Harbor, and a thorough examination was made of the suspect shipment when it was presented for customs clearance. Each of eight cases was broken open and checked closely against the cargo manifest, but each contained Chinese language books only. One must draw his own conclusions as to what had happened. And books went elsewhere. . . . About this same time Van Nostrand's representative reported a loophole of a different kind in the Customs Bureau's coverage. He described his experience with it as follows: Chinese students going for studies abroad are ailowed to take with them one copy each of texts that must receive the stamped prior approval of the Ministry of Education, otherwise Customs officials confiscate them at th£ time of departure. This provision is, however, not observed as students in Taiwan do export books. On the plane sitting with me were two Taiwan students going to Seoul. Each had a bulging pair of hand bags loaded with books. They got off the plane with these in Tokyo, but returned to the plane without the bags. Books of Taiwan origin similarly turned up in larger or smaller quantities almost any place there was a Chinese community for the Taiwan smugglers to do business with: Indonesia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and elsewhere. A thorny problem continued to be the aforementioned American "smugglers" themselves. A choice example involved the vigorous ingenuity of one of Taipei's best-known pirates who in 1963 sold out his 1,500-copy printing of Webster's Third New International Dictionary by an imaginative but ancient marketing method. He simply hired a boat, loaded it with the books, pulled alongside U.S. warships calling in Keelung harbor, and sold them at N.T. $250 (U.S. $6.25) apiece to American naval personnel aboard. As American servicemen came thus to know of this cheap source of books, it is probably not surprising that they continued on occasion to turn up in use

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BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

on American college campuses. Foreign students, of course, also contributed to the incidence of such use—as at Cornell in 1964 where a graduate student from Indonesia supposedly purveyed to his colleagues books pirated in Taiwan. When the use of smuggled books on American campuses became known to their administrators, most moved promptly and without fanfare to end the practice. Some, however, received considerable publicity. An example of the latter occurred at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1962 where four students were expelled for marketing Taiwan books. These students reportedly established the so-called Tech Textbook Agency to import pirated reprints for sale to college students in the area. The case was broken, however, before any of the books were sold. Evidence of all known cases in which Taiwan reprints had evaded the export ban was handed over promptly to officials of the Government of the Republic of China, which took action to tighten its embargo screen as rapidly as gaps in it came to attention. Given this kind of surveillance, book .smuggling was increasingly throttled between 1960 and 1963, but it did not end entirely.: Indignant and oversuspicious American interests, moreover, were to remain unappeased as long as a single pirated book was finding its way to market off the island, and a similar level of concern was also felt within the ministries of the GRC, which was coming now to feel that its honor was at stake. It had assured Western interests that pirated books would not be permitted out of the country, yet unquestionably some such books were still managing to get to foreign markets. The original 1960 export ban had been repeated and strengthened by the executive Yuan on August 22, 1962, but it had not yet become comfortably effective. In late 1963 therefore the GRC issued two separate orders aimed at resolving the issue once and for all. The more important of the two was signed on October 30. It forbade the carrying off of Taiwan of single copies of books by students, which had been allowed under the 1960 embargo. Far more

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significantly, however, it made apprehended smuggler!? liable to criminal action for the first time under the Statute for Punishment of Smuggling, rather than under the foreign exchange and trade control regulations. Thus book smuggling was jnow on a par with the smuggling of opium or gold and was punishable by up to seven years' imprisonment and fines of N.T. $23,000 (U.S. $575), which was truly a small fortune. The second GRC order, issued a week later, added confiscation of detected books to the usual enforcement measures. Postal and custonjs officials had previously simply refused to accept reprinted foreign-language books for export. Following issuance of these orders, the low remaining volume of export was even further curtailed.! Penalties were now much too severe for anyone in the legitimate Taiwan book trade even to consider exporting his wares—and almost all of the firms producing and marketing books there viewed their operations as being legitimate. If anyone in Taiwan were going to be caught exporting from here on, it would have to be either a professional smuggler or a truly unscrupulous member of the clandestine book community, of whom the number has always been small. A few complaints of book smuggling continued to filter into the American publishing industry, but those that could be checked out usually proved to be misunderstandings. One shipment of Taiwan books found in Malaysia ihad been received prior to the new regulations and kept in stock for a while. A book found in Bangkok had been carried off Taiwan by an airline pilot who needed reading matter to while away his energies during a long flight. At least one stock of books seems to have been counterfeited elsewhere—perhaps on the China Mainland—to look like a Taiwan product. But the relatively free international flow of smuggled Taiwan books that had existed in the opening years of the decade clearly was no more. In fact, it was fully seven months later that the next clear-cut case of Taiwan book smuggling in quantity came to light. In mid-July 1964, bookstores in Manila were approached by

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agents who offered immediate delivery of large quantities of more than one hundred titles of pirated Taiwan reprints. To each prospective buyer the agents either gave the same contact, a Mr. Keh Alfonso, or offered delivery to a certain China Lace Store in Cruz. The publishing community in Manila was immediately aroused at this illicit incursion into their usual sales area and reported the incident promptly to the American Embassy and to the Philippine National Bureau of Investigation. Alfonso Fajatin, the Philippine representative of Feffer & Simons, attempted with some success to track down the smuggler in hopes of buying something from him to be used as evidence. Using a pseudonym and posing as a quantity book purchaser from Cebu City, he managed to contact Keh Alfonso by telephone and made an appointment to meet him near several bookstores at the Cinerama in Azcarraga Street. When Mr. Alfonso, who turned out to be Chinese, arrived at the rendezvous he had three Filipino companions with him. Fajatin became a bit shaky because while they were talking the Filipinos kept lurking behind j him inquiring if he had ready cash to pay for immediate delivery. Fearing that he was about to be attacked and robbed, he claimed he had only two pesos in his pocket but that he would bring rnore cash to a meeting at eight o'clock that night. Understandably, Mr. Fajatin did not attend the second meeting so he never got his evidence, but he confirmed—to his own satisfaction at least—that large stocks of Taiwan reprints were already in Manila awaiting distribution to any interested buyers. Alfredo S. Nicdao, Jr., Philippine representative for Wiley, South-Western, and Rand McNally, reported a short time later that the pirated reprints were available in even larger quantities in the university town of Cebu City in the Southern Islands. Here again it was Keh Alfonso of Manila who was the peddler. The pressure there for the cheap reprints became so great among the students that legitimate bookstores were forced to lay in stocks of them in order to keep their customers. The Philippines had been among the original subscribers to the

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UCC, but the status of its commitment to the Convention was vague and ambiguous, and few American books had (been copyrighted there, so the sale of Taiwan reprints in the Filipino bookstores was at best of doubtful illegality. Theif importer, however, risked being charged under statutes related to unfair competition, economic subversion, and likely tax evasion and customs violations. The issue was worked on at length in official channels involving the Government of the Republic of the Philippines; the American Embassies in Taipei, Manila, and Djakarta (since it was rumored that the pirated books had entered the Islands through Indonesia); and of course by j the GRC, which went to work immediately to determine how the books had got loose from its shores. For a time there was belief in some quarters that they had left Taiwan prior to the October 30 strengthening of the export embargo, but this was unlikely since most smuggling interests did not have the capital to permit such a large stock of contraband to wait long for a buyer. It appeared rather clearly to be a case of current smuggling. A great flurry of concern for smuggling arose in Hong Kong early in 1963. On April 8 Hong Kong police seized several trunks from a seaman aboard the S. S. Nellore, a Pacific & Orient Line ship. The trunks contained 105 Taiwan reprints of American mathematics and science texts which a j sailor had allegedly purchased for U.S. $80 while his ship was Stopped in Keelung. The shipment, apparently destined for a student at New Asia College, was accompanied by two book catalogues from Taipei's Central Book Company. Central, it subsequently developed, had sold the books to a private party who had himself exported them. F. W. Kendall was retained by the ABPC to press piracy charges in Hong Kong, and the sailor involved—one Wong Siu-Ying—turned Crown witness. What started out as a neat, clear case of piracy in Hong Kong, however, soon became extremely complicated. At a simple hearing before a magistrate two weeks later, counsel for the defense attacked the Hong Kong copyright ordinance

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BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

itself, claiming that it drew; its support from the British Copyright Act of 1911 which had been extended the next year to the Crown Colony; the 1911 Act, however, had really been superseded in the United Kingdom by a new Act in 1956 which had never been made to apply to Hong Kong. Perhaps therefore there was no copyright protection at all in the colony. With this new development, the court adjourned to study the matter. On May 28, 1965, the charge against Wong Siu-Ying was dismissed, but not on the above basis. It was rather felt that no one of the three facts needed to clinch the case against the defendant had been proved by the prosecution. These were: 1. that the originals of the pirated books were protected by copyright; 2. that the seized books were illegal copies of copyrighted books; 3. that the defendant had ordered the books for purposes of resale. Not only was the defendant released, but all of the 105 pirated books seized from him were returned as well. The case of Regina v. Wong Siu-Ying did nothing to answer the questions raised by the defense concerning the protection of Western copyrights in Hong Kong, but it did make this possible legal loophole widely known among interested parties. Considerable furor ensued in the ABPC especially and in the Department of State regarding the issue, and for some time it appeared that no American books could obtain protection in Hong Kong unless they were first or simultaneously published there. Eventually, however, it became clear that the Crown Colony was covered by the Berne Convention. Although the United States is not signatory to this Convention, protection is at least guaranteed to such American books as are simultaneously issued in any country which is party to it. A majority, of course, of the most salable American books are so issued simul-

THE SMUGGLING OF BOOKS

HI

taneously elsewhere. This particular issue remains somewjhat cloudy today, however. Meanwhile back in Taipei it was clear that smuggling was indeed taking place somewhere, and intensive police investigation of the clues developed by such casesj as those involving Manila and Hong Kong was beginning to bjsar fruit. A "landmark" case broke in Taipei on August 3, 1965. On that date the vernacular and English-language press in Taiwan reported that warrants had been issued for the arrests oij Li Hsi-Hsiung and Huang Ta-Chun, proprietors of the Chinnjien Record Company, for involvement in a smuggling ring which had for two years been exporting pirated books and phonograph records to the other countries of East Asia. Real evidence in the case had apparently been found in May when postal and customs officers in Keelung discovered more than one hundred parcel post packages, weighing from ten to twenty-two poupds each, containing pirated books or records and documented with false customs declarations and incorrect return addresses. Following further investigation the case was remanded to the Taipei District Court which, on November 8, found indictments against a total of twenty-nine persons on from one to five counts, each connected with smuggling. The charges were forgery, fraud, smuggling, dereliction of duty, and violation of the National Mobilization Act. Illegal shipments!, it was determined, had been widely distributed to such places as the Philippines, Hong Kong, Vietnam, the United States, Thailand, Macao, Singapore, Sarawak, and Malaysia. The case came to trial in mid-January 1966, and twenty-one of the twenty-nine persons indicted received severe sentences. The heaviest penalty was drawn by one Lin WuHsiung, chief of the parcel post section of the Taipei Post Office, who was sentenced to seven years' imprisonment. The twentynine-year-old Lin, the Court found, received properties valued at N.T. $288,277 (U.S. $7,200) in return for placing surface mail parcels of smuggled books and records into the airmail

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BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

bags out of Taipei so they would circumvent the Keelung customs inspection. In addition to Lin's conviction, four other civil servants were found guilty and sentenced, as were three students, one laborer, and twelve businessmen, some of whom were professional smugglers. Perhaps the most interesting conviction so far as this report is concerned, was that of Hsu Yung-Fa, proprietor of the Fair East Book Company. Hsu confessed that he had accepted orders from one of the other defendants for books to be sent to the Philippines, but he claimed that he was ignorant of the laws about smuggling. The Court did not believe his protestations, however, and sentenced him to two months' imprisonment, the lightness of the sentence resulting from the fact that he had abetted rather than committed a crime. Strangely this case of such considerable importance to American publishing interests was never widely publicized in the United States. The general severity of the punishment meted out: to the twenty-one persons found guilty, however, was extensively recognized in Taiwan as clear manifestation that the GRC would not tolerate book smuggling. Since the dramatic disposition of this court case in early 1966 there have been no additional responsibly reported claims of quantity book smuggling from the island.

8©

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

The situation during the first half of the decade of the 1960's cannot be more succinctly described than in the words of Assistant Secretary of State Frederick G. Dutton, who wrote to Senator Carl Hayden, Chairman of the Committee on Appropriations, as follows on August 16, 1963: Since January 1962, the American publishers' groups have coupled any willingness on their part to consider a low-cost reprint arrangement with the condition that the GRC first simplify and reduce the cost of its registration procedures. On its part, the GRC has evidenced a reluctance to change its procedures or to enter into any copyright arrangement unless low-price reprint editions continue to be available. The present situation regarding a reprint program is a stalemate. The one thing, however, that continued to change dufing what was otherwise a standoff was the number of American titles reprinted in pirated editions in Taiwan. By the end of 1963 no fewer than 3,700 such titles were available in print there. A year later the number was reported at 4,600 and was still rising. The climate of opinion in the Republic of China, however, very much favored the negotiation between Taiwan and American book interests of some kind of authorized reprint program which would legitimize the industry there while not substantially increasing the price of books to Chinese students. Furthermore, the GRC was willing to listen constructively to all reasonable requests for modification in its supervision of the local book industry and to make such changes as appeared

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feasible. Several small but not inconsequential alterations were made by the executive Yuan on August 4, 1963. There were two among them that were of considerable interest to Americans. The first ordered the preparation in English as well as in Chinese of application forms for book registration with the MOI, presumably so that foreign publishers could apply direct for registration of their books without having to go to the expense of retaining a third party to execute the procedures in their behalf; strangely, these English-language forms were still not available well over a year later. The second was that the fee for registration, while remaining for the time being at ten times the price of the book, could thereafter be collected on the basis of the New Taiwan dollar selling price of the Chinese edition when there was one; the purpose of this arrangement was avowedly to encourage Chinese book merchants to contract with foreign publishers for permission to reprint. The next conciliatory steps taken by the GRC were the orders of October 30 and November 6, already discussed, which instituted severe penalties for book smuggling. Also, in November 1963 the Ministry of Interior called all Taiwan publishers to a special meeting and warned them that they would be expected thereafter to adhere to the letter of a law, previously observed more in its breach, requiring that the names of local printers and publishers appear on all pirated books and that all new publications be reported. This move gave the MOI greater efficiency of control over the local book industry. As a follow-up to this meeting the Ministry in June of 1964 staged raids on printers in Taipei, Tainan, Taichung, and Kaohsiung, and confiscated 6,200 copies of pirated books. Chinese newspapers on July 9 reported that "of the seized copies, seven are banned as obscene books, 833 found not bearing copyright notice as prescribed by the Publication Law, and 536 published without license." The legislative Yuan passed a revision of the Chinese domestic copyright law effective July 13, 1964. Although it did not contain changes that contributed greatly to

N E W EFFORTS TO BARGAIN

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reconciliation of the problems in Chinese-American bobk trade relations, the revision did substantially strengthen the GRC's ability to act against pirates of copyrighted books. Under the revision, for example, the aforementioned convicted pirate of the Encyclopedia of Science and Technology could have been imprisoned for two years instead of receiving the S30 fine reported earlier. The following month the executive Yuan established a high-level study commission to examine the entire range of problems involving the Taiwan foreign-language publishing industry. Minister of Interior Lien Chen-Tung himself was to act as convener, and also represented were to be the executive Yuan Secretariat; the Ministries of Foreign Affairs, Education, Justice, Finance, Communications and National Defense; the Council for International Economic Cooperation and Development; the Foreign Exchange and Trade Control Commission; the Government Information Office; the Taiwan Garrison Command; the Provincial Information Department; and the Provincial Police Department. The China News on August 29, 1964, described the work of the commission as follows: It will meet once a month. Its main job is to find out the current situation of book and record pirating, and if they are exported, how and by whom. The commission will also study how the problem of piracy, which has cost the Republic of China a considerable amount of good will among its American friends, can be solved once for all. The study commission had as its executive secretary one Hsiung Dun-Sheng, director of the MOI's Department of Publications Administration. A lawyer by profession, the young and gracious Mr. Hsiung had learned well the complex dynamics of accomplishment within the executive Yuan. He had earned the acceptance not only of his colleagues in government, but of the people in the Taiwan and American book industries and in the United States government agencies in the Republic of China as well. His diligent surveillance of the Taiwan book

116

BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

trade in recent years has done much toward keeping it under control. Few concrete accomplishments can be attributed to this study commission, but it probably served a useful function nonetheless. In the first place, it generated a high level of concern and a fairly uniform climate of response for the problem within the Cabinet of the GRC. Second, through a carefully prepared program of public education and a judiciously placed series of press releases during 1964 and 1965, it contributed considerably to awareness of the problem among the Chinese people themselves. Articles and editorials appeared in the vernacular press which, although consistently siding with cheap textbooks, generally advocated the elimination of piracy. Most of this press response was due to a calculated effort within the MOI, and under Mr. Hsiung's direct supervision, was designed to condition public opinion to the true issues involved. American publishers meanwhile, concerned over the continuing rise in the cost of producing their Asian editions in Japan, observed increasing GRC control over the book trade and the steady improvement in the quality of Taiwan reprints, and they wondered if a time would come when Nationalist China would serve as a major source of cheap books for Asian students. Their first problem, some felt, would be to find a Taiwanese firm to do business with that had not been tainted by past piracy activities; such firms of course did not exist, and it was unrealistic to expect to find any. Almost all of the Taiwan reprinters had done exactly what good businessmen have always done everywhere—they operated their activities to the limit of the law in the interest of profits and what they felt to be the public good. Onto the New York scene thus obfuscated by conflicting concerns and emotions there came at this time a member of the Taipei Embassy staff to explain the view from the other side. Dr. Harry E. T. Thayer, who had for some time been the American economic officer responsible for handling the problem of Taiwan piracy, met on July 17, 1964, with represen-

NEW EFFORTS TO BARGAIN

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tatives of the United States industry in the offices of the American Book Publishers Council in New York. At the conclusion of a thorough review of all aspects of the situation and of I GRC actions and attitudes toward it, there was cautious consensus within the group that the possibility of an enlarged authorized reprint program should again be explored. | In this increasingly healthy climate of publr and official opinion, all parties involved came to feel that an era was approaching wherein face-to-face negotiations would be fruitful. American publishers' representatives, of course, had long been trekking in and out of the Republic, but there had been no concerted effort to exchange views and to air complaints between the book industries of the two countries—and no Chinese foreign-language publishers had ever visited the United States. American bookman Bruce Rogers was in Taiwan in early 1964, and his report represented the situation!there in somewhat softer tones than had those of most of his predecessors. "Perhaps the American publishers should take a realistic view of the situation;" he wrote, "and not profess such high moral indignation? Accept the situation and see where advantage can be reaped from it." He pointed out that, if Taiwan reprinters received authorization to do their work: 1. they could, by having been given exclusive rights, register and protect those rights themselves, as is dfrie in other countries; 2. since Taiwan reprinters were ready to pay royalties, American publishers would at least receive x percent of something instead of 100 percent of nothing; 3. American firms could save their legal fees; booksellers would look after the Americans' interests because these would be their own interests as well; 4. American publishers would need to put up no capital and would have no expense. As a culmination of all of these conciliatory actions and views, serious, official, face-to-face negotiations

118

BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

were eventually established between the book industries of the two nations. They began with two visits to Taiwan early in 1965 by senior men from the American book industry. The first was Leo Albert, President of Prentice-Hall International. The stated purpose of his visit was to obtain firsthand information in preparation for a visit by an official representative of the American industry to come shortly thereafter. Mr. Albert made an extensive circuit of calls on officials in the GRC, the American Mission, and the Chinese book industry. His factual report was generally optimistic and indicated that his meetings and conversations with the pirates themselves were healthy. In March of 1965 Basil Dandison, Senior Vice President of the McGraw-Hill Book Company, made an official round of visits to informed persons in Taiwan seeking in the name of American book interests a final resolution of the piracy problem that could be beneficial on both sides of the Pacific. Again a simple but valuable product of the visit was a greater awareness on the parts both of the antagonists and the protagonists of one another's views and problems. By far the most far-reaching outcome of the visits to Taiwan by Messrs. Albert and Dandison, however, was a proposal that the so-called Global Royalty Fund (GRF), an instrumentality of the United States Agency for International Development (AID), be utilized to bring some order out of the chaotic Taiwan publishing community. The GRF had been established in 1964 for the purpose of enabling AID to subsidize, through the payment of requisite royalties, the local production in emerging countries of reprints of books it felt to be in the best interests of the economic and educational objectives of those countries. The proposal now was that Taiwan booksellers might be authorized by American houses to reprint small editions of certain books approved by AID in return for an initial advance against royalties to be paid from the Global Royalty Fund. The likely salutary effects of such a program were envisioned in Mr. Dandison's report to the ABPC-ATPI on April 19, 1965, as follows:

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The advent of the subsidy made available to U.S. publishers by the U.S.. government should gradually bring order to the reprinting of U.S. textual materials in Taiwan. It should strengthen the reputable publishers and tend to discourage the pirates from engaging in their business. The Ministry of the Interior, which is charged with the responsibility of taking remedial action with piracy, has stated that if sufficient textual materials needed in the English language can be made available by methods agreed upon by the U.S. and Chinese .governments and publishers, the Ministry will work toward eliminating all other unauthorized reprint?. All parties closely involved were impressed with the potentialities of the GRF scheme as applied to Taiwan. AID/Washington promptly concurred in principle and suggested that a sum of $25,000 might be authorized for FY 1)966 to cover royalties, not to exceed $500 per title, on some fifty titles. The Joint International Trade Committee of the American Book Publishers Council and the American Textbook Publishers Institute, which between them represented firms and organizations publishing 95 percent of the books produced in the United States, in August 1965 produced a document recommending to their members appropriate procedures for selling English-language reprint rights to Taiwan booksellers under the GRF plan. In the Republic of China the scheme was hailed as the first clear-cut manifestation that American interests recognized and were seriously concerned about the book needs of Chinese students. Remaining as a major stumbling block to many American firms was knowing just which of the Taipei booksellers could be trusted as business partners and which could not. All had, of course, been pirates and many Americans were inclined to overlook the fact that piracy was legal and instead to imagine extrapolation of that activity to other nefarious activities of innumerable kinds. Most of the people working in the Taiwan book trade in 1965 had been in the industry for a long

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time. At the head, of course, of everyone's list was Choh ChinShin of Southeast and New Moon, followed closely by Rainbow-Bridge's Sun Kuo-Jen, Tan Chiang's Chiu Ju-Shen, Central's T. K. Lin, Eurasia's Liao Chin-Chin, and Far East's incorrigible Hsu Yung-Fa, all of whom have been mentioned here before. There were some new names too, however, including a former police officer named Jack C. Chow whose Bookcase Shop near the hotel district had reprinted an enviable list of best-sellers; Min Hwa, a professor at the National Medical Institute and owner of the University Book Company which had reprinted medical books; Chen Kuan-Yau, whose Universal Book Company had also reprinted medical books; and Hann Tao-Tsung, whose Hsin Lou Book Company had successfully pirated the World Book in a 1,500-copy edition a year earlier. There were also reprinters in the down-island cities of Tainan, Taichung, and Kaohsiung, and at least one—China Arts Gallery —was working in Keelung. The extent of the work of these several firms is shown in Table I, which lists them all and the number of in-print i English-language titles each contributed to the 1965 combined Taiwan catalogue of books. There was also another newcomer on the scene —one who was destined to shake up the entire Taiwan reprint industry. His name^ was Sueling Li. Born on the China Mainland, he had spent most of his life in the United States, and had received an American education capped with a degree from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. An American citizen, Mr. Li had worked successfully in several industries both in New York and in Taiwan—including dealing in grain, hog bristles, frozen foods, and other diverse interests. Sueling Li's father—also a man of wide-ranging business talents and interests—was chairman of the board of the old, highly respected Chinese-language publishing house named Chung Hwa, and the younger man came increasingly to share his father's interest in the book industry. He saw especially that English-language reprinting had an enormous potential in Taiwan, if the industry could only somehow be legitimized, and he

Table I. Subject Distribution of Titles Reprinted by Taiwanese Firmsjand Contributed to the 1965 Combined Catalogue of English Language Books In Print in Taiwan

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344 4552

123

first approached American publishers in August of 1§63 inquiring if they would consider retaining an agent in I Taipei to supervise and administer there an authorized reprint program. His approach, however, came shortly after the acquittals of the pirates of the two McGraw-Hill titles, and Americans were at the time totally disinclined to discuss with anyone the possibility of doing business in the Republic of China. A year later, however, Mr. Li went to !New York and visited some thirty American firms, explaining his aspirations to enter the legitimate English-language reprinting business in Taipei and exploring with them the possibilities oi receiving authorizations from them to do so. He was the first person most American publishers had ever seen from the Taipei fxade, and although they were extremely cautious in their responses, almost all of them were very favorably impressed. Here was a man— both Chinese and American—who had succeeded in business both in the East and the West, a man of impeccable attainments (he was president of the Taipei Rotary Club at the time), a person untainted by past piracy activities, and one who could present identifiable credit references, and who could speak the same business language as the people he was addresising. Furthermore, he was genial, personable, and obviously a man of parts. Early in 1965 Sueling Li allied himself with an American with long experience in Taiwan and founded Mei Ya Publications, Inc., which literally translates as "American-Asian Publications." His partner in the venture was Robert L. Irick, a Harvard graduate who wrote and spoke Chinese fluently, and who was then director of the Association for Asian Studies, a nonprofit organization seeking, among other things, to identify, classify, and index all Chinese classics. Mei Ya opened an excellent manufacturing plant, by Chinese standards, on the banks of the Tamsui river in the Taipei suburb of San-ChungShih—the first private publishing company in the Republic to combine its photographic, printing, and binding departments into one plant. Mei Ya also purchased from the widow of its

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former owner the so-called Literature House, a former minor pirate bookstore in downtown Taipei, to handle its distribution. Although Mr. Irick soon left the partnership, the firm of Mei Ya was almost immediately a substantive force in the Taipei trade. Mei Ya's timely entry into the Taipei melee coincided almost exactly with the search by American houses for trustworthy business firms there with whom they could negotiate contracts under the Global Royalty Fund, and some of them looked upon its arrival almost as a miraculous answer to prayer. Prentice-Hall immediately signed contracts with Mei Ya for six titles—even before the GRF scheme was approved for Taiwan —and other firms soon made similar authorizations. Following another round of New York visits by Sueling Li in the late fall of 1965, Mei Ya became even more favored. Meanwhile the GRF negotiations were finally concluded in the spring of 1966. By February AID had approved some 156 titles for which the American publishers would receive fifty cents per page in return for allowing 2,000copy editions to be made by Taiwan reprinters. Of this number 106 had been fully contracted for between their American proprietors and Taiwan correspondents. A moratorium was then declared in the issuing of GRF contracts while improvements were drawn into the program and imperfections in its administration were reconciled. Great hope, however, was placed in the scheme by book interests both in New York and in Taiwan. Many of the problems remaining in the Global Royalty Fund program were resolved to the satisfaction of all parties involved during the second week of May 1966. During that week Taiwan was officially visited concerning the issue by Prentice-Hall's Leo Albert and by George Sadler, chief of AID's Central Book Activities. The purpose of their visit was to explain widely to Taiwan booksellers the advantages and meaning of the GRF program. Messrs. Albert and Sadler stressed to the Taiwan booksellers that the United States was willing to forget the past if only it could have assurances of the future. At a meeting in

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Taipei's Rose Marie Restaurant on May 11 they informed representatives of the trade that they were prepared to jurge their colleagues at home to grant Chinese publishers blanket rights for a specified period to sell without the payment of royalty the remaining copies of pirated editions still in their possession. In return they would expect Chinese publishers individually to forswear future piracy and to join a new self-policing association which would accept for membership only "reformed" booksellers. A substantial number of the authorizations to be granted would be funded initially through the GRF prograrn, but for titles not so covered the Chinese reprinter would negotiate for a commercial contract, presumably at a royalty amountjing to 10 percent of the Chinese list price. Taipei's fifteen leading booksellers attended this meeting with the American deputation, as did representatives from the American Embassy, and Hsiung Dun-Sheng and Chu Yu-Ing of the MOI. Results were most gratifying to all parties involved. The week of negotiations concluded with a very promising set of tentative understandings in which there appeared to be total concurrence. These understandings may be summarized as follows: I . 1. The GRC would continue to police energetically any unauthorized export of reprinted books. j 2. GRC Copyright Office would reduce registration fees from ten times U.S. list price of a book to six times the Taiwan price. 3. GRC Copyright Office would simplify documentation for registration to the point where the U.S. publisher would have only one simple certification of ownership and authorship to sign. 4. GRC Copyright Office would guarantee action on a request for copyright registration within a two-week period. 5. Under Ministry of Interior leadership, the previous association of book printers and distributors, which

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6.

7. 8. 9.

10.

11.

included all the book pirates, would be officially disbanded, and a new association would be formed to include only those firms agreeing not to pirate. Past pirated editions would be fully and honestly declared, and stocks certified—with a reasonable number of months allowed for disposition. After such period, remaining copies would be destroyed. An agreement would be drawn up and signed between the new Chinese Association and the U.S. book publishers' associations. Under new procedures, Chinese publishers would pay a commercial royalty to U.S. copyright owners equivalent to 10 percent of the Taiwan edition price. The AID Global Royalty Fund would be used for a limited period of time—likely to be one to one and one-half years—to cover the royalty fee for first runs not to exceed 2,000 copies each, for a limited number of development-related titles. Royalty payments for additional copies of these titles and all copies of other titles, would be handled on a private commercial basis, as under item 8. Sales were to be for Taiwan only until it became established to the satisfaction of the GRC and the U.S. book industry that unauthorized reprinting is for all practical purposes nonexistent in Taiwan. If and after piracy was abolished, it was anticipated that the GRC would lift the export ban for authorized editions, so Taipei could become a useful point for publication of low-cost editions of basic U.S. development-related texts and reference books.

Taiwan publishers were very pleased at the whole development. They were as a group entirely willing to relinquish their piracy practices of the past in exchange for the likely acquisition of the substantial overseas Asian markets for English-language books. On May 26 the Bookcase Shop's Jack

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C. Chow, recently elected chairman of the Taipei Foreign Book Publishers Association, wrote to Leo Albert in the naine of the Association, enclosing a proposal which approved in general of the understandings of the Albert-Sadler visit, although) no mention was made of overseas markets. The approval was signed by all but one of the Taipei booksellers thus far mentioned in this report plus two or three others, and it is likely that at least some if not ail of them were sincere in their expression of willingness to give up pirating. The past records of a few of them, however, did not in the eyes of the still-cautious New York industry lend assurance to their protestations. From the Western point of view, t^iere were clearly some difficult questions about the proposed new relationship. How, for example, could an accurate count be made of the pirated copies still in stock as called for in point 6 if the pirate himself chose rather to report a falsified count? Also, hbw could Western interests be assured that signers of an agreement would not continue to pirate under other names when it was in their interests to do so? Moreover, once a Chinese firm got a contract to reprint, what was to prevent it from printing and selling far in excess of the number of copies for which royalties would be paid? Nonetheless there was hope in all minds that even such difficult questions as these could be resolved now that serious negotiations had begun across the bargaining table. With sound and satisfactory conclusions so imminent, everyone began to breath a little easier and to look forward eagerly to an early end to the long, trying period of misunderstanding and ill will.

THE SITUATION WORSENS

Dashed Hopes and Increased Chaos: The Situation Worsens

Unfortunately, the beautiful plan that resulted from the Albert-Sadler mission was destined to fail almost immediately. It is ironic yet typical of the whole history of the Taipei piracy problem that the plan did not fail because of serious disagreement with it on the part of any of the parties directly involved. Failure resulted rather from a series of three separate blows, each of which was either entirely fortuitous or had grown from misunderstanding, and any one of which was probably strong enough by itself to have destroyed the fledgling scheme. Certainly the plan was not yet firmly enough established to have withstood all three. The first occurred even before the negotiators left town. On May 12, 1966 the China Post reported the series of meetings, and the report contained some rather egregious errors in fact as well as in spirit. Under the head "ROC Can Print Books for Export," the Post proceeded to describe as a fait accompli a complete agreement which went far beyond the cautious and tentative aspirations arrived at by the conferees. As its title indicated, the article explained that accords had been reached whereby Chinese reprints of English language books could be produced for world markets. Understandably, the article proved embarrassing to almost everyone concerned, but it was especially so to the American negotiators because they had not been empowered by anyone to conclude agreements on anything, and certainly not on Taiwan book production for export.

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Leo Albert promptly objected and] supplied a factual correction to the Post's erroneous report, but the great damage was already done. The story had been distributed by the China News Service, and on May 30 Publishers' Weekly used it to the further detriment of the negotiations. Upon seeing the inaccurate PW write-up, several American publishers immediately declared that they had agreed to no such arrangement and did not plan to do so. Members of Congress, whi:h had long held "hard line" attitudes toward piracy, were distiessed at the seeming implication of the article that Taiwan pirates were now going to be subsidized by AID funds. The Japanese printers of authorized Asian editions of American books were chagrined to learn—albeit wrongly—-that they were about to lose to the Taiwanese lucrative contracts to reprint Asian editiohs of American books. Once such misinformation gains circulation, of course, it is well-nigh impossible to stop, and this proved to be the case with regard to the China Post story. The rumor gained both impetus and credence from a second story, this one in the China News, that appeared on July 20, 1966. It claimed that Local publishers and government officials concerned are trying to persuade American publishers to print Asia editions in Taiwan. American publishers print their Asia editions in Japan for export to other Asian points. Japanese publishers are making some 20 million out of the deal. Local publishers are trying to get this business or at least part of it when the agreement with Japanese publishers expires in June 1967. If they can get half of the business it will be around 10 million. But before this is taken up American publishers want to settle once for all the piracy problem. They also want improvement in the quality of paper, printing and book binding in; Taiwan. Similar articles, more or less elaborated, also appeared in Taiwan's vernacular papers. For a time a kind of "Gold Rush" appeared

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likely as Taipei houses tried to get into the best position to profit from the new bonanza. Some indicated interest in acquiring better offset presses and other new production equipment, while the more cautious worried about the development of idle excess printing plant capacity. This entire flurry of activity in the Chinese trade was initiated by the unfortunate press handling of the Albert-Sadler visit. The hopes of the Chinese industry were built too high by press reports, and disappointment was bound to result. Had it not been for the inaccurate press coverage of the affair, however, one of two other factors would doubtless have ruined it anyway. One was the fact that the enterprising Sueling Li had come out of the spring with practically all of the GRF-supported contracts in the name of his firm, Mei Ya Publications. This fact began to become clear to the American industry as it attempted to summarize its early experience with the scheme in February and March of 1966. In a round-up of data on February 17 the industry learned that some 156 titles had been approved by AID/Washington for GRF funding. Of these, 129 had been recorded by Franklin Publications, which was acting as a kind; of agent-of-record for the operation. Although Franklin had received completed contracts—that is, signed by both American proprietors and Taiwan reprinters— for only twenty-three of these 129 titles, it was rumored that of those received and those pending, Mei Ya had already signed for ninety! The American industry was fearful of the repercussions that might occur in Taiwan if any one firm there received too large a share of the GRF contracts awarded. The purpose of the GRF scheme was to legitimize a large enough segment of the Taiwan industry so that any otherwise uncooperative balance would be forced in its own interest to comply with new legitimate trade standards. It would not serve this purpose to have a large majority of the authorizations concentrated in the hands of a single firm; such a development would rather

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force the rest of the trade to go its own way disgustejd with the whole program. Here then was a dilemma. The American industry wanted to spread its contracts among many firms, but it could not know exactly which firms it could trust to treat their relationships faithfully. On the other hand, American houses feared that the one partner whom they knew they could trust implicitly was acquiring too many contracts to meet the objectives of their program. Furthermore, the industry could certainly not accuse Mei Ya of any wrongdoing; Sueling Li Mad simply gone to American publishers in good faith and had signed binding contracts to reprint their books under the GRF program. He had not in any way overextended himself; he had wholly adequate capacity in his plant and firm to produce and market the books as he had contracted to do. Mei Ya's near-monopoly of GRF-fuhded titles presented an even bigger dilemma to the other Taiwanese booksellers, however, as its meaning began to come clear there several months later. Mei Ya, it eventually worked out, had received well over a hundred such authorizations, while among them Rainbow-Bridge, National, and Tan Chiang held a handful of others. The old, established pirate firms, such as Southeast's New Moon, Central, Eurasia, and Far East, had received none, yet they constituted a large portion of the power structure in the Taipei book trade; for any scheme to work it would have to enjoy the cooperation of at least some of these larger and older firms. The pirate firms'reactions to Mei Ya's favored position, moreover, became almost violent when they learned that the contracts which the new publisher had received and had duly registered for protection with the MOI included the titles of many of their best-selling textbooks—textbooks in some cases that they had been pirating and selling for years and for which they had built substantial markets in the universities. These were books which they currently held in large stocks, and which

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they had come over a period of time to view almost as their own rightful property. As Mei Ya gained copyright protection for one of its newly acquired authorizations, it would go to the former pirate of the title and inform him that any further sale of his edition would be in violation of rights now owned by Mei Ya and would if necessary be resolved through litigation. As an alternative, however, Mei Ya would offer to enter into an agreement with the pirate, making him the sole wholesaler of the title in return for 20 percent of the remaining stock. Half of this fee, of course, would be paid over by Mei Ya to the New York publisher as a royalty payment, the other half remaining with Mei Ya as an agency fee for administering the contract and conducting requisite negotiations. Mei Ya viewed this arrangement as contributing to a healthy atmosphere in which authorized titles were assured legal protection, careful accounting, and sound supervision in a Western sense which would help to pave the way to a legitimate Taiwan English-language reprinting industry. The pirates who thus had to give up one out of every five books in their stock, however, viewed it in very different terms. Although they had little alternative but to accept Mei Ya's offer, most considered the arrangement as little more than a new form of legalized piracy, and several vowed to fight the new firm in every way they could. Some simply took their stock underground and continued to sell clandestinely, but this was difficult and dangerous to do with the close supervision of the trade which was maintained by the MOI. Mei Ya's method of legitimizing stock was to take over all of it, retain 20 percent, and return the balance with each copy stamped with Mei Ya's chop; thus the MOI could readily recognize by the sign's absence that a book had been sold illegally. Most of the pirates, however, wished to remain legal and live up to the letter of their new contract, although at the same time many pledged to do their best to

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damage Mei Ya's interests in every legitimate way that pre( sented itself. ! The greatest damage the pirates; could inflict upon Mei Ya was to discourage the sale of titles! to which the new firm now held rights. Many of the pirates, as has been said before, were on excellent terms with the professors who determined what texts would be used in the universities, and the pirates now called upon that friendship. Wherever Mei Ya held an authorization, they got the professor to adopt a different text for the subsequent semester. Although this actibn was quite successful in that it unquestionably hurt Mei Ya, it also had at least five harmful side effects upon the rest of the Taiwan industry as well: 1. It artificially forced additional reprinted titles into a market already glutted with an oversupply. 2. Since more titles were being produced for the same number of students, printings were made in shorter runs at a consequent higher unit cost. 3. The competition resulting from more hvprint text-book titles brought on price-cutting and greater discounting. 4. It brought into use in the universities textbooks which were in some cases second best for their purposes. 5. The costs of getting new books adopted, coupled with new production costs, forced the pirates in the face of growing competition to be content with an! even narrower profit margin than they had settled for in the past. The outcome of the Mei Ya boycott was indeed damaging to the firm, but it also put the entire trade into a condition approaching total chaos. Even if the confused handling' of the press releases concerning the GRF negotiations had not wrecked the scheme therefore, it would doubtless have collapsed because of the lopsided awarding of GRF-funded contracts. As though

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these fates were not trouble enough for the beleaguered program, however, still another blow borne of misunderstanding was to arrive soon. In January of 1966 the G. & C. Merriam Company received a letter from Taipei's Southeast Book Company requesting authorization to reprint Webster's Third New International Dictionary under the GRF program. The Merriam Company, however, was not a member of the American Book Publishers Council and was apparently ignorant of the GRF scheme and of the great hopes that a substantial portion of the industry and the government had riding on it. Merriam did know, of course, that its own interests had in the past been damaged by Taiwan piracies and that the United States Congress had manifested concern for the general problem. It therefore not only declined Southeast's request on the same day it was received, but its president, Gordon J. Gallan, also promptly sat down and dashed off a letter to Senator Leverett Saltonstall animadverting upon what appeared in his judgment to be AID's dabbling in activities beyond its proper sphere of concern. Many people :in government shared Mr. Gallan's ignorance of the GRF plan and of its potential utility as a device to cure a long-standing ill. Even as the first GRF support was finally being released to the Taiwan program in April of 1966, serious questions were being asked in Washington concerning the desirability of its continuation. United States economic aid to the Republic of China had supposedly ended on June 30, 1965, and in the eyes of some the use of the GRF there looked very much like a form of continued economic aid. In view of the Department of State's commitment to the Congress that no more AID funds would be used to support Taiwan's economic development, AID's Regional Bureau recommended on April 10, 1966, that the GRF program there should be terminated as of June 30. On April 27 Basil Dandison testified before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on behalf of the ABPCATPI and spoke favorably of the GRF scheme, but insofar as Taiwan was concerned, the program was already doomed to

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discontinuation. Despite the fact that responsible American officials had in good faith committed themselves to! the GRC on the matter, and although extended dialogue regarding the issue continued for several months through Washington offices, the efforts of the program's proponents came to naught. In a sense, the GRF's continuation in Taiwan was authorized in October 1966, but in such emasculated form as to guarantee its nonuse by American proprietors. The authorization of support was for such Taiwan reprints as were to be made available for export only, a condition that was as yet absolutely unthinkable to American firms. The GRF program in Taiwan was destroyed after only three months of actual use, as were aljso the hopes that had been built upon it. The whole fiasco was very damaging to SinoAmerican book trade relations. When the Chinese learned of the program's abrupt termination, their reaction was understandably and uniformly bitter. The MOI had fulfilled its part of the Albert-Sadler accords by reducing the registration fee from ten to six times the price of a book and by simplifying registration procedures, and the Taipei book trade had fulfilled its part by affirming almost to a man that it would relinquish its past piratical practices. In return, however, it had suffered some rather severe losses through the taking over by Mei Ya of rights to many of its best-selling titles, and through the confusion of myriad kinds that had spread itself upon the industry. To some, the preceding six months had all the appearance of a grand and successful American plot to sabotage the Taiwan industry; others felt that they had been badly out-traded, and the Chinese —as everyone else—do not like to be out-traded. It was only the Oriental tradition of maintaining equanimity in the face of adversity that kept the response in Taipei from becoming more virulent than it did. Not much remained to be done except to conduct business as usual. A few hardy souls—specifically Leo Albert and Basil Dandison—moved about the scene attempting to salvage what they could. Mr. Dandison especially, was to be

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put to work on the problem. In addition to his extensive experience and superior knowledge of Chinese-American book trade relations which gained him the confidence of his American colleagues, he also presented a kind of avuncular wisdom and dignity born of a long and fruitful life, which was much respected by the Chinese. It had long been recognized in both camps that Mr. Dandison, recently retired from his post with McGraw-Hill, could probably do more than anyone else to help bring order out of the befuddled state of negotiations. In the fall of 1966 Mr. Dandison devoted great thought and energy to the problem. The productivity of his efforts took the form of three separate proposals, which he imaginatively designated "Plan Bootstrap," "Plan Hopeful," and "Plan Alternatives." These several schemes amounted basically to brain-storming the problem, and some highly creative solutions and partial solutions—some brilliant and some brittle, some practicable and some unwieldy—found expression in the resulting documents. Several basic assumptions underlay the varied ideas encompassed in Mr. Dandison's schemes. They included the following propositions: 1. the low-priced reprinting capability of the Taiwanese should be utilized by American publishers; but 2. the Taiwan markets needed first to be cleared of old pirated stocks; and 3. retail prices of Taiwan reprints needed to be raised to a level which was more competitive with world book prices He contemplated several ingenious—although not necessarily impracticable—devices for accomplishing the goals implicit in these assumptions. Included among them was the nationalization of pirated books by the GRC, which would compensate the owners at 50 percent of Taiwan list price and sell them to the Taiwanese public at 25 percent of United States list price, which price structure would thereafter be observed for authorized

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printings. This arrangement would also entail the j issuance by the GRC to students of scrip which could be used to cover one-half of the purchase price of their textbooks, tlius eliminating the possible complaint that the scheme would otherwise raise the cost of a university education. | Another notion essayed by Mr. Dhndison was that a philanthropic foundation or government agency be sought to purchase all pirated stocks from their owners at 15 or 20 percent of the Taiwan list price to be distributed gratis to currently negligible export markets where they copld serve to foster improved educational, economic, and cultural development, and better understanding and appreciation of the United States. Books thereafter published in authorized Taiwan editions would pay their American proprietors a royalty of 110 percent of Taiwan list price on sales in the country and 25 percent of Taiwan list price on export sales. Obviously this latter scheme would have proved much more palatable to Chinese interests than the former, although a 15 percent reimbursement to the pirates for their stocks may have been a little low. Generally the Taiwan book pricing structure is that, of the list price, 10 percent represents the cost of paper; 10 percent represents the cost of casing; 10 percent represents the cost of plates and printing; 30 percent represents the publisher's profit 10 percent represents bookseller's profit 30 percent represents retail discount In the case, of course, of old stocks originally made for export, 20 percent would actually represent an increase in their marketable value, because they have otherwise been virtually unsalable since the export bans of 1960 and 1963. There were alternatives in Mr. Dandison's thinking, such as the ceding of future rights for royalties of 5 percent of U.S. list rather than 10 percent of Taiwan list, and the retail pricing of Taiwan reprints at 20 percent of U.S. list on copies sold on Taiwan and 25 percent of U.S. on copies sold in export

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markets, again with the GRC supplying scrip to students to offset partially the increase in local retail price. These and many other similar convolutions of ideas resulted from his extended deliberations on the matter. During the fall he tried his ideas on several knowledgeable members of the American industry, and their reactions spawned still other possible contributions to solutions. Although a consensus of the American industry never took form in support of Mr. Dandison's several plans, they nonetheless aided in the generation of more widespread understanding in the United States of the problems current in Taiwan piracy. Ensuing discussion also gave him a sounder opinion base for his next trip to Taiwan, which came on April 13-19, 1967. During this visit to Taipei Mr. Dandison interviewed GRC officials, American Embassy officers, and members of the Taiwan trade; his report to the New York industry upon his return did not mince words. He stated bluntly: The plain fact is that the Chinese government and publishers have the U.S. government and U.S. publishers "over a barrel" and our bargaining power is negligible—especially since AID is being phased out in Taiwan. He did, however, recognize the need "to develop a closer business relationship with the Chinese publishers." Throughout this period of a year, from mid1966 to mid-1967, the Taiwan industry was also busy thinking, and some rather imaginative concepts resulted there as well as in New York. There was discussion for a time of forming an association of legitimate Taipei publishers which could seek ad interim en bloc ceding to the association of the rights to all pirated titles on a trusteeship basis which would allow the association to distribute copyright on such books among member publishers who would sign a definite agreement to abandon piracy once and for all. The Taipei Foreign Book Publishers Association

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at a meeting on May 1, 1967, discussed another ! novel idea which involved organizing a cooperative enterprise ivith a substantial capital which would be funded largely with stocks of pirated books; the enterprise itself would then handle for its members all future copyright negotiations, conceive and implement plans for the disposition of old stock, police the trade, and serve as a unifying force for the good of the industry generally. In the late summer of 1967 Sueling Li proposed to the Taipei industry what had the appearance of being by far the most workable interim arrangement yet. He envisioned a Foreign Book Publishers Guild of Taiwan, for which Mei Ya would serve as a kind of broker in authorizations. Under this arrangement a Taipei dealer wishing to issue an American book would request authorization through Mei Ya as agent. Mei Ya would apply for the authorization, control the printing, and supervise the accounting and payment of royalties to American proprietors of 10 percent of Taiwan list prices. Where there was already some previously printed stock of the title, Mei Ya would inventory it for the dealer and legitimize it with Mei Ya's chop to be sold on the same royalty basis as the new printing. Mei Ya would also handle applications for copyright registration with the MOI, where the authorizations would be recorded in the name of the dealer but held by Mei Ya as agent. In return for these services as supervisor of the contract, the dealer would pay to Mei Ya a fee amounting to 5 percent of the Taiwan list price. Some of the Taipei booksellers were totally skeptical, not so much with the scheme itself as with the idea of trying to do business with Sueling Li. Members of this group frankly felt that Mr. Li, an American citizen, was a paid agent of the American industry; they felt that they had already been fleeced by him of properties that they had long viewed as their own, and they vowed never to do business with him. Some others, however, viewed his great success at getting authorizations in quantity out of American publishers, and, recognizing their own insecurity in continuing to issue unauthorized books that could and were being in turn pirated from them by other

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pirates, or being taken over by Mr. Li anyway as his own firm gained authorization for them, wondered if the time had not come to try to use his talents rather than fight them. Furthermore, they argued, if indeed he were an American agent, it would mean that he would be in an even better position to deliver authorizations as a broker than if he were not; being an agent therefore would be an asset upon which they themselves could draw. The firms that rejected Mr. Li's plan included predictably: Far East, which could be counted upon to wish to remain footloose; Southeast, which, having suffered greatly at Mei Ya's hands already, was understandably leery and inclined to remain aloof from entangling alliances; and Rainbow-Bridge, whose inimitable proprietor Sun Kuo-Jen always preferred going it alone. Among the firms that decided to try Mr. Li's guild, however, were some that had never before manifested any willingness to seek authorizations for their publications. The cooperating firms included Bookcase, Central, Eurasia, Mei Ya's Literature House, National, Tan Chiang, and University. Among those interested therefore were the second, third, and fourth largest Taiwan pirates. The scheme, so far as Taiwan was concerned, represented a major breakthrough. Having to a large degree sold his scheme to a strong segment of the Taiwan industry, the dynamic Mr. Li againflewoff to the United States in November 1967 to gain the cooperation of the United States industry. He needed the support of a substantial number of American houses in order to make the plan work, having been requested by the cooperating Taipei dealers to acquire for them the rights to some 243 already-pirated titles and 110 new ones owned by fifty-six different American publishers. In an extended round of interviews and conferences, Mr; Li explained his plan in detail and, as he had on his previous visits, made a strong personal impression. His plan was novel, however, and some of the smaller firms he approached had possessed previously only such knowledge of Chinese-American book trade relations as they

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had gleaned from the occasional biased presentations that had appeared in the Western press. He had therefore some formidable obstacles to overcome before he could gain their cooperation in the plan to a degree adequate for its success. Tlie year 1968 opened thus on an optimistic note as regards Taiwan piracy of Western books, but the problem obviously was far (from solved.

THE PRESENT SCENE AND CURRENT TRENDS

mn 12 This Point Whither: The Present Scene and Current Trends It has been said that if twenty American publishers and twenty Taiwan reprinters could sit down together for two days, the entire problem of piracy would be solved. Although there may be some wishful thinking reflected in this statement, there can also be little doubt that such a confrontation would ameliorate the situation greatly. It would at least prove to Western publishers that the Taipei trade is peopled in part by gentlemen of integrity and honor rather than by unprincipled scoundrels, as they have so often been painted in Western accounts; Taiwan booksellers furthermore would come to realize that American publishers are indeed concerned about the need for low-priced books in China as well as other developing countries, rather than being interested only in maintaining skyhigh prices and vast profits. There are, of course, sharp traders on both sides, and there are unquestionable differences between the business sociologies of the East and the West. Business patterns in the West have for a half century or more been largely determined by big business, and the social responsibilities of big business can range geographically over many nations and chronologically over decades. Business in China has been primarily small business, and it has lacked the resources to enable it to take more than the short view of its responsibilities to society. There are other differences as well. It has also proved difficult in the Orient, for example, to gain cooperation short of collusion, or to operate from strength without wielding naked power, or to negotiate without attempting also to manipulate. Because Chinese reprinters seldom act like

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Western reprinters, American publishers have been tempted to distrust them. Chinese reprinters in turn have beeij inclined to impute their own motivations to the actions of Western publishers. It is thus especially difficult for them to understand Sueling Li. Here is a man who looks and talks like a Chinese but whose concepts of social urgency differ totally from their own, a man who can sustain financial loss for months at a time while he builds a firm that can serve ten years hence. Wherever Taipei booksellers meet, they spend their time trying to determine Li's "angle," and to puzzle out where and how he gets his squeeze while maintaining the appearance of being an honest businessman. The world of readers meanwhile has undoubtedly suffered from the absence of agreement between the two. Students, technicians, professional personnel, and others in developing countries need good books as cheap as they can get them, and as in the case of any other essential commodity, it would seem to be the responsibility of their proprietors to make them available. Instead, however, of applying their energies jointly to accomplishing this laudable end, both American and Chinese publishers have for well over a decade been sitting in their respective council meetings engaged in games of psychological projection, trying to outguess one another. One can read into the foregoing account of this stalemate an indictment of human creativity, where—despite urgent need for them in Asian markets—large stocks of the world's best technical books have been allowed for seven years to languish in Taipei warehouses under an export embargo which their owners in the East and their "proprietors" in the West should somehow have found ways to have lifted. Basic reasons for this continued inaction appear to be really rather few. Certainly suspicion: and misunderstanding of one another's motives have been paramount. Poor communication has been a large factor. Stubbornness and inflexibility have to too large a degree characterized attitudes in the book industry and government in the United States, in the

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Taiwan book trade, and in the GRC. It was because both sides had fixed themselves to too rigid positions that the Global Royalty Fund was so welcome; regardless of whether or not it would have solved the problems of Taiwan piracy, if it had been given a chance, it would at least have furnished face-saving compromises to both parties and could have cleared the way for further negotiations. Ignorance of the ramifications of the piracy problem and sometimes downright rudeness in a large segment of the American industry has also contributed to its continuation. A substantial number of requests for authorization from Taiwan firms, for example, have failed even to elicit the courtesy of replies from American copyright holders. Often the replies that do come manifest gross unconcern for the matter. One Taiwan bookseller displays a letter received from a major American house in response to his polite offer to pay an advance on royalty for permission to reprint. "We regret," reads the curt, single sentence of the reply, "that we do not allow unauthorized reprints to be made of Our books." It is small wonder that,' after pondering this baffling, nonsensical communication, the bookseller reprinted the book anyway. It is furthermore likely that the next time he wishes to reproduce a book owned by this company, he will shrug and proceed to do so without inviting the insult of another such response. It is no more difficult for Taipei booksellers to assume on the basis of this single experience that all American publishers are rude, than it is for American firms to believe that all Taipei booksellers are easy-conscienced because the Far East Book Company was sentenced in a smuggling case. In view of these considerations, it does indeed appear that much good could come from a face-to-face encounter of a large number of Eastern and Western publishers. Certainly neither side stands to gain another single thing from continuing to adhere to their present positions. The West can gain nothing from the status quo in its aspirations to supply cheaper books to Asian markets; China, on the other hand, is

THE PRESENT SCENE AND CURRENT TRENDS

145

now selling as many books as it is possible to market until agreement is reached allowing export. And although! both sides are free to deny themselves benefits if they so choose:, it may be legitimately asked if they also have a moral right to continue year after year to hinder regional development by not making the cheapest books possible available to Asian markets. On the brighter side, however, it might be said that resolution of the problem is closer than it has ever before been. The work of Leo Albert and of Basil Dandisoii has been excellent in that it has convinced Taiwan interests that there is at least some sincere concern in the American industry for the plight of the Chinese booksellers. Taiwan booksellers, through the hard loss of many of their best "properties" to fueling Li, have learned a healthy and profound new respect fot the value of authorization and copyright. The GRC, although (steadfastly rejecting the UCC, has nonetheless made concession! after concession to the demands of the Western book community. It is important to recognize that the GRC has made all of the changes which the Americans were claiming in 1960 would be necessary before it would work with the Taipei trade. It has implemented a strong export embargo and has made it clear through rigorous enforcement and prosecution that it intends that it be observed; it has reduced the; copyright registration from twenty-five times to six times the price of the book; it has greatly simplified the procedures for! copyright registration; and it has gained a substantial measures of control over the entire industry. It is also useful to recognize that the Taipei book trade has done what has been asked of it by the American industry. It has, almost to a man, offered to give up piracy whenever American publishers are ready to authorize reprints. It has attempted with some success to organize itself in such a manner as to have some self-policing capability. It has indicated its readiness to pay royalties whenever copyright holders will accept them. The Taiwanese populace is also prepared to ae-

146

BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

cept an authorized reprint industry. A large body of public opinion has been built up favoring the elimination of piracy. Virtually all informed Chinese—educators, civil servants, students, economists, and others—agree that the country's income level has advanced to a point where people can afford to pay the necessary increase in book prices that would allow a reasonable royalty for American copyright holders. The Ministry of Education has indicated that it is prepared—as soon as it feels that an adequate selection of textbooks is available in authorized editions—to prohibit the use of pirated books in the nation's schools and colleges. Also, Ministry of Interior officials have hinted on several occasions that, if United States publishers will generally authorize reprints to be made in Taiwan, it will recommend the outlawing of piracy altogether. Once these things are accomplished, of course, the GRC would find little reason remaining to continue to shun the UCC. These things cannot be accomplished, however, without action by the American publishing industry. If it is indeed sincere in its avowed desire to help the Republic of China enter the family of responsible publishing nations, it must educate and involve itself in the search for a solution to a much greater degree than it has in the past. Many more than the handful of hardy internationalists who have thus far given of their talents and time must come to grips with the issue with public-spirited concern for the good of the publishing profession of the world. Large problems, of course, remain to be resolved. It would appear from the foregoing account, however, that the major obstacles have already been overcome, and that resolution now lies within the grasp of the industries of the two countries, if they will but reach out for it. It furthermore appears that important benefits from resolution will accrue not only to the parties directly concerned but also to the public at large. If this be true, Chinese and American publishers can yet look forward to working together for the public good and for their mutual gain.

Appendix; Death oj a President, a Case Study

"Literary racketeers are preparing to publish sections of William Manchester's book which were deleted from the original manuscript," proclaimed an article in the New York Journal Tribune on December 21, 1966. A copy of the unexpurgated manuscript, the report continued, had got into the hands of Taiwan pirates where it was to be reproduced f'on 16 pages of thin paper that can be mailed in ordinary airmkil envelopes. In this way they hope to avoid detection by U.S. Post Office authorities." The New York Times on the following day reported that some 1,200 typescript pages of the manuscript had been taken to Taiwan for reprinting. In order to forestall any embarrassing episodes, the Washington Embassy of the Republic of China immediately called the Department of State and gave assurance that official steps would be taken in Taiwan to see-that, if the expunged copy were indeed to get there, it would not be published. On December 23 the Taipei \ China News quoted Hsiung Dun-Sheng, Director of the MOI's1 Publications Department, as saying that "all printing shops and publishers in Taiwan have been warned against printing the controversial book if they have got the manuscripts." The much greater likelihood, of course, is that none of the suppressed text had got to—or was ever destined for —Taiwan, but that the story was rather someone's attempt to gain another banner head for the much-publicized Manchester book. The Taiwan pirates could hardly have been tempted by such a venture, because they are almost totally lacking in original English-language composition capability; indeed they hardly know what to do with copy unless it is already in type and ready

148

BOOK PIRATING IN TAIWAN

to be reproduced by photo-offset, which the suppressed passages were not. Doubtless the pirates were, however, even at that early date, laying their plans for the actual piracy of the finished Manchester book whenever it should be ready. With the enormous publicity which had attended the preparation of the book, it could be counted upon to gain a wide and immediate sale wherever there was an English-reading public. On December 27, 1966, therefore, Mei Ya Publications requested authorization of Harper & Row to issue a Taiwan edition. Death of a President was published in New York on April 7, 1967, and within eleven days a pirated version had already been issued by the Tung Hai Book Company in the down-island Formosan city of Taichung. The New York price was U.S. $10 and the Taichung list price was N.T. $100 (U.S. $2.50), but since virtually all books in Taiwan sell at a retail discount of at least 30 percent, it brought N.T. $70 or less in the stores and stalls. The first four hundred copies of the Taichung piracy were put into the Taipei-markets on the morning of > April 21, and some sixty copies sold immediately. Four hours later, however, all remaining copies of the book were confiscated by the police under orders from the Ministry of Interior, which was apprehensive that the Taichung printing might indeed contain the offending passages that it had guaranteed would be suppressed. Despite the confiscation, plenty of copies remained to be had clandestinely, and that afternoon the black market price promptly climbed to N.T. $250 a copy. A day later, however, the price dropped even lower than it had been originally, due to the appearance of two new pirated editions of the book, one issued by Taipei's incorrigible Far East Book Company, and the other produced by a private individual in the capital city. Ironically but typically, the two new pirate printings were reproduced not from copies of the New York edition, but from copies of the Taichung reprinting. Thus pirates were pirating piracies. It worked as well as the original, however, and with

APPENDIX

149

the three underground editions competing with one another, the wholesale price of the book leveled off at N.T. $38 and the retail price at N.T. $50. On May 1, 1967, Mei Ya Publications concluded its contract negotiations with author Manchester and commenced its first printing of 2,000 copies of heath of a President. Five days later it registered the Taiwan edition copyright with the MOI. Upon assuring itself that the Mei Ya edition did not contain any portions of the suppressed text, the MOI on May 25 issued a copyright license for the book to Mbi Ya. Two days later the government ban on the sale of the bbok, which had been promulgated in December, was lifted, and ijvlei Ya put its authorized edition into the market to retail at N.T. $100. By May 12 Mei Ya's first printing was sold out, and a second printing of 3,000 copies was begun. In mid-May Mei Ya met with the several pirates of Death of a President in an effort to clear the black market of bootlegged copies of the book. On May 27 it took over from them all unsold stocks of the pirated printings, totaling 2,785 copies, in return for cash or book exchange, thus stabilizing prices and eliminating market confusion. On July 17, 1967, Mei Ya commenced its third authorized printing of I the book, amounting to 3,000 copies. No evidence has ever been found thajt the original suppressed passages from Death of a President got to Taiwan.

INDEX Academia Sinica, 45 Addison-Wesley, 39 Albert, Leo, 118, 124, 127, 128, 129, 130, 135, 145 Alfonso, Keh, 108 American Book Company (ABC Store), see Far East Book Co. American Book Publishers Council, 30-31, 58, 59, 60, 62, 68, 72,73,75,81,91,92,94, 102, 110,117,118,119,134 American (Authors) Copyright League, 14 American College Dictionary, 46 American Company of Booksellers, 10 American Publishers Copyright League, 14 American Textbook Publishers Institute, 31, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 62, 68, 72, 73, 75, 91, 92, 94, 102, 118, 119, 134 Asian editions, 24, 40, 116, 129; see also Far East editions Association for Asian Studies, 123 Australia, 103 Authors League, 63 Bangkok, 51, 107 Bell, Robert, 7-8 Benjamin, Curtis G., 62, 72, 75

Berne Convention, 15|16, 62, 110 Booher, Edward E., 94j Book World Co., 42, 9j5, 96 Bookcase Shop, 120, 126, 140 Brett, Bruce Y., 58-59, 67, 68, 75 Bruggeman, L. L., 75 Bunkensha, 23-24 Burma, 58 Byrne, Patrick, 7 Carey, Henry C , 4 Carey, Mathew, 7 Carey & Lea, 9-10 Carroll, Mary, 7 Censorship, 4, 32, 43, 44, 47, 48 Central Book Co., 41, 109, 120, 131,140 Chappie, John, 49 Charless, Joseph, 1 Chen Chi-Yin, 82 • Chen Kuan-Yau, 120 ; Chi Yuan-Pu, 82 ; Chinmen Record Co., I l l China Arts Gallery, 120 Chiu Ju-Shen, 41, 53, 120 Choh Chin-Shin, 36, 37, 39, 42, 48, 96, 120 Chow, Jack C , 120, 126, 127 Chu Yu-Ing, 125

152

Index

Chung-Yuan College of Science and Engineering, 86 Clark, Alden H., 62-63, 72 Clay, Henry, 13 Collier's Encyclopedia, 48 Colorado State University, 56 Colorado, University of, 56-57 Columba, St., 3 Coons, Rudolph, 86, 88-89 Cooper, James Fenimore, Last of the Mohicans, 10 Copyright Code of 1912 (U.S.), 15 Copyright law (Gt. Brit.), 4-5 Copyright law (Japan), 23-25 Copyright law (U.S.), 6-15 Cornell University, 106

Feffer & Simons, 108 Finnian, 3 Forkert, Frank, 40, 63 Formosan Magazine Press, 71 Franklin Publications, 26, 60, 130 Frase, Robert, 60, 75 Freeman, 39 Fu Tar Hong, 71 Fulbright, William, 67

Dandison, Basil, 118, 134, 135, 136, 137, 138, 145 Dawson, Moses, 7 Dodd, Thomas J., 57, 67 Donaldson, Alexander, 5, 6 Dornin, Bernard, 7 Drumwright, Everett F., 83 Dundee, Earl of, 50 Dutton, Frederick G., 113

Hai An, S.S., 103 Hann Tao-Tsung, 120 Harpers, 9, 148 Hayden, Carl, 73, 113 Heath, 39 Henry, John, 7 Herter, Christian A., 72 Hogan, Ben, Modern Fundamentals of Golf, 24 Hong Kong, 22, 48-51, 74-75, 102-103, 109, 110, 111 Hsiao Meng-Kung, 42 Hsiao Sheng-Meng, 95-96 Hsieh Min-Shan, 86 Hsin Lou Book Co., 120 Hsiung Dun-Sheng, 115, 116, 125, 147 Hsu Yung-Fa, 35, 37, 112, 120 Hu Shih, 45 Huang Ta-Chun, 111 Huang Yu, 83, 84, 85

East Asiatic Book Co., see Far East Book Co. Elibank, Viscount, 50 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 42-47, 70, 79, 80, 95, 103 Encyclopedia Americana, 47 Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, 95, 97, 98, 99, 115 Eurasia Book Co., 41, 88, 120, 131,140 Fajatin, Alfonso, 108 Far East Book Co., 35, 36, 37, 41, 55,88,94, 103, 112, 120, 131, 140, 144, 149 Far East editions, 24, 29, 33, 40; see also Asian editions Farrell, James T., Young Lonigan, 24

Gallan, Gordon J„ 134 Ginn, 39 Global Royalty Fund, 118-119, 124, 125, 126, 130, 131, 133, 134, 135, 144 Greene, John C , The Death of Adam, 55

Illinois, University of, 83 India, 38, 51 Indonesia, 105, 109 Informational Media Guarantee, 67, 68, 69, 70, 71, 72, 80 International Copyright Association, 13

Index Iowa State University, 53, 54, 55, 56, 102 Iowa State University Press, 54, 55 Iran, 38 Irick, Robert L., 123, 124 Japan, piracy in, 23-24 Johns Hopkins University, 56 Judd, Walter H., 67 Keatinge, George, 7 Kendall, F. W., 50, 51, 102, 103, 109 Kiang Yi-Seng, 57, 76, 91, 93 Korea, 22, 38, 56, 104 Lacy, Dan, 75, 81 Lee, Paul, 53, 54 Li Chin-Fang, 83 Li Hsi-Hsiung, 111 Li Sueling, 120, 123, 124, 130, 131, 139,140, 143, 145 Li Tse-Min, 43 Liao Chin-Chin, 41, 42, 120 Lien Chen-Tung, 115 Lin, T. K., 41, 120 Lin Wu-Hsiung, 111, 112 Literature House, 94, 124, 140 Liu Ching-Ti, 36, 37, 95, 96 Liu, Lucy, see Liu Ching-Ti Longmans Green & Co., 49 Lucy Book Store, 36, 95 Lyon, Matthew, 7 Macao, 22, 103, 111 McGraw-Hill, 123, 136; sues Japanese pirate, 23; office building pictured, 35-36; has 100 titles pirated, 40-41; is informed of EB piracy, 46; is concerned about Samuelson's Economics, 55, 95; refuses translation rights, 60; Booher testifies, 94; registers Encyclopedia of Science, 95; Dandison visits Taiwan, 118 Macmillan, 58

153 Malaysia, 107, 111 Manchester, William, Death of a President, 147-149 Marks, Joseph, 102 Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 56, 106 j Mei Ya Publications, 123, 124, 130, 131, 132, 133, 135, 139, 140, 148, 149 Merriam, G. & C , Co., 134 Michener, James, Hawaii, 87 Min Hwa, 120 Minnesota, University of, 56 Mori, Jun, 23 National Book Co., 131, |l40 National Medical Institute, 120 National Taiwan University, 29, 42, 97 Natural Science Study Society, 23 Nellore, S. S., 109 New Moon Book Co., 36, 41, 120, 131 Nicdao, Alfredo S., 108 North Dakota Agricultural College, 56 Pauling, Linus, General Chemistry, 34 Pennsylvania, University of, 120 Philippines, 22, 49', 58, 105, 107, 108, 111, 112 Prentice-Hall, 42, 118, 124 President Lincoln, S. S., 104 Princeton University, 56 Rainbow Bridge Book ; Co., 42, 55, 83, 120, 131, 140 Rand-McNally, 108 : Registration for copyright, 30, 31, 32, 37, 38, 76, 79, 87, 114, 125, 135 Regulations for the Enforcement of the Copyright Law, 78, 80 Rogers, Bruce, 117 Sadler, George, 124, 127, 128, 130 135

Index

154 Saltonstall, Leverett, 134 Samuelson, Paul A., Economics, 55, 95, 96 Scott, Sir Walter, Waverley novels, 8; Peveril of the Peak, 9 Singapore, 22, 51, 105, 111 Snyder, Henry M., & Co.; 86, 104 Southeast Book Co., 35j 36, 37, 39, 41, 42, 48, 55, 88, 96, 120, 134, 140 South-Western, 108 Stationers' Company of London, 4-5 "Statute of 8 Anne," 5 Stoneham, Lord, 50 Sullivan, Warren, 75, 91, 92, 93 Sun Kuo-Jen, 42, 83, 84, 120, 140 Taipei Book and Educational Supplies Association, 90, 91, 92, 93 Taipei Foreign Book Publishers Association, 127, 138 Talbot, Christopher, 7 -I Tan Chiang Book Co., 41, 53, 54, 55, 88, 102, 120, 131, 140 Tang, Miss C. C , 97-98 Tao Hsi-Sheng, 83 Tao Po-Chuan, 85 Thailand, 105, 111 Thayer, Harry E. T., 116 Tien Chiung-Chin, 82, 85; Townsend, Marshall, 54 Toyo Shobo Co., 24 Translation rights, 25, 26; 27, 76 Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation (1903), 25 Treaty of Friendship, Commerce and Navigation (1946), 27

Tsao,W.Y.,75 Tsar, Ruchin, 95, 96, 97, 98 Tung Hai Book Co., 148 Tung Ya Book Co., see Far East Book Co. Tuttle, Charles E., 24 U.S. Bureau of Customs, 72, 73, 74, 75, 94 United States Code, 15 Universal Book Co., 88, 120 Universal Copyright Convention, 15, 16, 24, 59, 63, 65,75,76, 79, 92, 109, 145, 146 University Book Store, 97, 120, 140 Van Nostrand, D., 86, 88, 105 Vietnam, 111 Washington Bear, S. S., 104 Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 47 Webster's Third New International Dictionary, 87, 102, 105, 134 Webster's New World Dictionary, 46 Wiley, 108; pirated in Japan, 23; registers titles, 39; has 55 titles pirated, 40; finds piracies in Iowa, 53-56; reacts to piracy, 63 Wisconsin, University of, 56 Wong Siu-Ying, 109-110 World Book, 120 Wright, Norman J., 86 Yamamoto, Susumu, 23