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382            On the right to the performance

has been altered. The author or publisher has suffered
losses only to his property, since a reproduction was carried
out by unauthorised persons. However, it all amounts to no
more than a quantitative matter, a question of property: he
who is reckoning with having a thousand readers will not be
displeased to see this number increase, and from this perspective
authors have looked not so unfavourably on reprinting. But where
someone intended a play to be published, it may certainly be
asked whether he really would approve of, and consent to, a
completely different manifestation - namely, a stage performance -
to be effected with the play. Such a performance would expose
the author to the risk of general displeasure and insults which
may very well accompany it. As a result, therefore, one would be
subjecting him to a risk which, without his consent, one is not
entitled to make him incur in the first place. In the wider sense
of the word, one is doing something which is injurious to him.
      My late friend Neustetel tried, in his ingenious final
treatise on reprinting according to Roman law, to demonstrate
that already on the basis of common law reprinting is forbidden
because an author can file an actio injuriarum [an action for
injury to a person's reputation] against a reprinter. It is certainly
true that in Roman law, which does not recognise intellectual
property, but which, on the other hand, does consider the sphere of
the actio injuriarum in the widest sense, no other means
of redress [against reprinting] can be found. One must also admit
that there is a double injustice in reprinting: on the one hand, that
of depriving the owner of a rightful profit, and, on the other, that
of arrogating to oneself the decision on publication, to which no one
else but the author or the publisher he has appointed is in fact
entitled. It is precisely the latter which constitutes the injurious
aspect referred to above. However, if such an injury takes place
already with reprinting, how much more must this be the case with
a stage performance, where the manifestation is, moreover, different
to what the author had intended. One cannot even make the objection
here that if