Letters on copyright
“Fourteen years ago, at the first publication of these letters, the important case of authors versus readers–makers of books versus consumers of facts and ideas–had for several years been again on trial in the high court of the people.”
(Letters on International Copyright, by Henry Carey, 1868, available at Project Gutenberg.)
I am half-way the book now. The letters form one large essay against letting non-US authors such as Dickens have copyrights in the US. The reasoning is sometimes far-fetched; the author presents a lot of examples, but tries to pass them off as statistics (which, BTW, is how the debate is being held to this very day). Nevertheless this seems a useful historical document for those who wonder how on earth we got to this mad state of current copyright law.