Oh Dickens! History repeats itself!

Every living day is a learning experience. I recently discovered something new, to drive home the point that counterfeiting and bootlegging is not just the work of Chinese and the members of the Third World. Many laws have been belted out to safeguard an entity called intellectual property.
Back in the time when America was a young nation made up of disgruntled individuals who escaped poverty, famine and persecution in the European continent, Charles Dickens, the English novelist, discovered, much to his chagrin, that many of his works like David Copperfield were printed and sold indiscriminately without any permission from him in the New World. In fact, during his visit to New York, besides giving lectures in support of condemnation of slavery and recording many of his impressions of America, he lobbied in raising support for copyright laws!
Fast forward, one and half century later, the tides have reversed. America is acting with 'holier than thou' attitude against countries thriving to come out from ashes to survive.

Excerpt from the past...

Struggles For Copyright Laws
In January 1842 Charles Dickens and his wife, Catherine, traveled to the United States. Dickens wanted to see the sites, learn about the country and do research for a future series of articles.
While on tour Dickens often spoke of the need for an international copyright agreement. The lack of such an agreement enabled his books to be published in the United States without his permission and without any royalties being paid.
This situation also affected American writers like Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's works were published in England without his consent.
Dickens first realized that he was losing income because of the lack of national in international copyright laws in 1837 when The Pickwick Papers was published in book form. At times the novel was reprinted without his permission and sometimes even imitated.
Some of Dickens's struggles with copyright laws made it into his fiction. In this scene from Nicholas Nickleby, Nicholas is speaking to a man "who had dramatised in his time two hundred and forty-seven novels as fast as they had come out--some of them faster than they had come out . . ."