Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [193]
In the generation-long struggle over reprinting that preceded this moment, skeptics based their antagonism on a refusal to abstract a principle of authorial property from the spatial extensions of power that it would in practice require. That is, they insisted that a universalization of authorship must be imperial in more than a metaphorical sense. That is why Appleton and Youmans had to base their plan for a transnational scientific community on the fragile basis of courtesies - and why such visionary endeavors provoked passionate opposition. The reasoning led in a direction diametrically opposite to that of the otherwise similar arguments leveled against patenting in Victorian Britain. The antiproperty camp in Britain proclaimed that the integration of the empire depended on the eradication of copyrights and patents; the antiproperty camp in America proclaimed that independence from that empire depended on the same deed. A link between empire and intellectual property-as it now came to be called-underlay both.
It is the beginning of a new century, and the music industry is facing a crisis. New technology, new media, and innovative business practices are challenging the copyright principles that have underpinned the industry for as long as anyone can remember. Taking advantage of a revolutionary process that allows for exact copying, "pirates" are replicating songs at a tremendous rate. The public sees nothing wrong in doing business with them. Their publicity, after all, speaks of a mainstream music industry that is monopolistic and exploitative of artist and public alike. The pirates, by contrast, are ostentatiously freedom loving. They call themselves things like the People's Music Publishing Company and sell at prices anyone can afford. They are, they claim, bringing music to a vast public otherwise entirely unserved. Many of them are not businesses on the traditional model at all, but homespun affairs staffed by teenagers and run out of pubs and even bedrooms. In reaction, the recently booming "dot" companies band together to lobby the government for a radical strengthening of copyright law-one that many see as threatening to civil liberties and principles of privacy. In the meantime they take the law into their own hands. They resort to underhand tactics, not excluding main force, to tackle the pirates. They are forced to such lengths, they say, because the crisis of piracy calls the very existence of a music industry into question.
If this all sounds familiar, it is not because it is a description of the troubles facing today's entertainment goliaths as they confront libertarian upstarts online. This is a portrait of the early twentieth century, not the twenty-first. It was a time when the music industry faced a piratical threat more serious than ever before or-until recently-since.
At the beginning of the twentieth century the music industry in Britain and the United States was an enterprise devoted to the sale of printed sheet music. The publishers producing such music did so on a truly enormous scale. Copyright registrations between i88o and i9oi came to over eight thousand a year, and the actual number of titles issued was much greater.' Perhaps twenty million copies a year were printed in Britain alone. The best-known pieces sold in the hundreds of thousands. The small number of wildly successful songs, like Stephen Adams's The Holy City, became major cultural icons (Adams's song, perhaps the most pirated musical piece prior to the Internet, would find a place in Joyce's Ulysses). As the industry was fond of pointing out, such hits cross-subsidized the many songs that were only modestly successful or that failed outright. To create them, publishers spent money on what they called "advertising," which included paying "royalties" to well-known music hall and vaudeville singers to perform particular