Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [196]
The publishers reacted to the pirates both individually and collectively. Chappell and Co., one of the main music publishing firms, seems to have been the first to take a strong stance. Its William Boosey was in the process of expanding the company's interests into the ballad market, in conjunction with regular ballad evenings at the Queen's Hall, and therefore had a new concern for the protection of copyright. The other major publisher to be concerned was the firm of Francis, Day and Hunter. This firm had evolved out of a minstrel act and now published large quantities of popular song (along, rather appallingly, with do-it-yourself minstrel kits). The most important alliance forged by such companies was at first the Music Publishers' Association, created as early as 1881 by Boosey. The MPA encompassed not only all the major London publishers, but also a number of authors and composers, including Gilbert and Stanford.
The problem these firms and composers faced was not one of legal right. The law clearly decreed that copyright in printed music existed. The difficulty lay in translating that principle into practice. The law accounted copyright violation a civil offense, not a criminal one. This meant that tracking down perpetrators was largely a matter for their victims. They had no right to enter private premises to search for pirated music, however, unless the householder admitted them. No self-respecting pirate was ever likely to do that. Even if they did succeed in getting hold of pirated music, moreover, the most they could hope for was its destruction. Any award of costs was likely to prove futile, since the hawkers they usually apprehended tended to disappear before hearings, or else to plead poverty. The publishers would find the pirates back on the streets within hours, clutching fresh bundles of stock. This kind of problem existed for all publishers, of course. But it was not a great problem for books, since a book represented a relatively substantial capital investment and its seizure was consequently a serious matter for the pirate. With music, each copy amounted to only a sheet. Printing replacements was therefore cheap, fast, and easy. Pirates freely allowed them to be seized en masse, regarding it as a minor inconvenience - or, as one said, a small tax on their operations. Such a tax was certainly no deterrent given the profits to be made. No wonder, then, that some among the publishers came to the conclusion that they needed to go beyond the law.
TO CATCH A THIEF
InJanuary 1902 the publisher David Day, of Francis, Day and Hunter, resolved upon more direct action. Day was already known for his staunch opposition to piracy: in 1897 he had been described as "the mildest mannered man that ever cut the throat (so to speak) or scuttled the ship of the piratical song printer." But what he planned now was far more risky than any strategy previously undertaken. He hired the services of a detective agency and raided a piratical warehouse himself, seizing five hundred copies of pirated sheet music. The raid was almost certainly illegal, but the astounded pirates offered no resistance. Encouraged by the success, Day and his men then moved on to "attack" a cottage in the north London suburb of Dalston, where hawkers were gathering to pickup pirated copies to sell on the street. They pretended to be hawkers in order to gain access, and nabbed fifteen thousand copies more. An unfortunate barrow boy yielded another four thousand. Yet another eight thousand came from a hawker's premises, twenty thousand from a room near Mansion House. Elated, Day retreated from the field and waited to see what the pirates would doll
What they did, as it turned out, was nothing. The Dalston men had summoned a policeman, but when he declined to get involved they did not