Charles Dickens himself eventually discovered that there’s a financial upside to weak copyright protection. A quarter of a century after his initial visit to the United States, Dickens made another visit. Maintaining his family was ruinously expensive and he needed to make some money. And he reckoned that so many people had read cheap knock-offs of his stories that he could cash in on his fame with a lecture tour. He was absolutely right: off the backs of pirated copies of his work, Charles Dickens made a fortune as a public speaker, many millions of dollars in today’s terms.9 Perhaps the
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