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The purpose for securing and selling a copyright of the Book of Mormon in Canada­—rather than the copyright (a subtle but important legal distinction)—was to ensure that if the book were to be republished outside the United States, Joseph Smith, as the legally designated “author and proprietor,” would retain the legal intellectual property in the book and receive appropriate monetary compensation from sales. “Because a popular book [in the early nineteenth century] was usually reprinted in other countries without authorization at any rate in absence of international copyright laws,” selling a copyright to the Book of Mormon for the four provinces of Canada would have “hastened the printing and distribution of the book in that part of the British Empire.”

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