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By Root 1914 0

profit per item. After all, the success of the pirates in selling vast numbers of copies ought to convince the publishers that selling cheap could pay. And the fact that the MCA had had to resort to "a sort of police" scarcely indicated confidence that it had the public on its side. Stories of scandalously underrewarded composers now began to abound. The Evening Standard, for example, recalled how, at a time when "pirated craft cruise through the main and other thoroughfares of the metropolis," Strauss's B/ne Danube had made £ioo,ooo for its publisher in just one year, but Strauss had pocketed only £40. Through 1904, as the pirate war intensified, such stories resounded with increasing frequency and piquancy. Skeptics complained that even people who went out of their way to help the MCA against the pirates were treated shabbily. Embarrassingly enough, in several cases pirates brought before magistrates turned out to be ex-MPA or -MCA agents who said that they had been forced to turn pirate by the excessive prices charged by the legitimate publishers. "I can't help myself," said one. "The publishers charge such an enormous price for their copies." Their insider knowledge had only helped them become better pirates.16

Still, one of the main objectives of the campaign was being realized, albeit at a high cost in terms ofpublic repute. As well as running to ground individual pirates, the MCA wanted to make piracy an issue on the national political stage. In this it succeeded. In October 1902 a new musical copyright act came into force. Intended to strengthen the hand of the publishers, the new law permitted the police, on being given a written request by a victim of piracy, to seize illicit sheets without first obtaining a special warrant. For the first time antipiracy raids could become official police actions. And the police moved fast to put their new powers into practice. In London the acting commissioner circulated a printed warning to hawkers that piracy would not be tolerated. At the same time Day and the MPA deployed their own force, numbering now perhaps a thousand men in the capital alone, to capitalize on this official backing. With letters of authorization from the major publishers, more MPA agents spread out across the country. The level of seizures went up dramatically. In the following three months alone 750,00 o copies were lodged in police stations, awaiting the bonfire.

But that very volume betrayed a fatal weakness in the campaign. The seizures sounded impressive, but after a short time it became clear that the flow of piracies was not being staunched. Worse still, none of the pirated music seemed to be going to the incinerators. Police stations were simply becoming warehouses for hundreds of thousands of copies of pirated music that nobody wanted, and their cells were fast filling up with paper. Something, the police realized, was wrong.

The problem was that the same legal system that outlawed piratical invasions of intellectual property also treated the copies as objects of physical property. Therefore they could not be wantonly destroyed. Soon after the campaign began, a magistrate in London made this explicit. He insisted that the pirate from whom copies had been seized must always be heard from before they could be destroyed. The police lacked the power to arrest and detain pirates summarily, however; the only way to get them to court was by serving a summons. And because almost all hawkers either lacked a permanent address or refused to give it, a summons rarely worked. Of five to six thousand summonses issued in the ensuing period, only 287 were successfully served.17 Almost always, the men disappeared into the city's backstreets, leaving no trace of their presence. They simply abandoned the seized copies, which promptly fell into a legal limbo, neither property nor nonproperty. Meanwhile the hawkers obtained more copies from their suppliers and returned to work. In other words, the 1902 law failed, as one magistrate said, because it did not oblige the pirate to defend himself 18

The mere amassing