Amazon.com description: Product Description: A paper read January 29th, 1878, before the New York Free-Trade Club. The questions relating to copyright belong naturally to the sphere of political economy. They have to do with the laws governing production, and with the principles regulating supply and demand; and they are directly dependent upon a due determining of the proper functions of legislation, and of the relations which legislation, having for its end the welfare of the community as a whole, ought to bear towards production and trade.