Start with English authors selling books in the United States in the nineteenth century. “During the nineteenth century anyone was free in the United States to reprint a foreign publication” without making any payment to the author, besides purchasing a legally sold copy of the book. This was a fact that greatly upset Charles Dickens, whose works, along with those of many other English authors, were widely distributed in the United States, and “yet American publishers found it profitable to make arrangements with English authors. Evidence before the 1876–8 Commission shows that English authors sometimes received more from the sale of their books by American publishers, where they had no copyright, than from their royalties in [England],” where they did have copyright. In short,without copyright, authors still got paid, sometimes more without copyright than with it.
How did it work? Then, as now, there is a great deal of impatience in the demand for books, especially good books. English authors would sell American publishers the manuscripts of their new books before their publication in Britain. The American publisher who bought the manuscript had every incentive to saturate the market for that particular novel as soon as possible, to avoid the arrival of cheap imitations soon after. This led to mass publication at fairly low prices. The amount of revenues British authors received up front from American publishers often exceeded the amount they were able to collect over a number of years from royalties in the United Kingdom. Notice that, at the time, the U.S. market was comparable in size to the U.K. market.
--Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine, Against Intellectual Monopoly (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 22-23.
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