Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [204]
The Christmas Eve raid was the first of a series of spectacular attacks over the next eighteen months. They progressively revealed a network of piratical manufacturing and distribution, run, to all appearances, by Willetts. In early 1904 Abbott raided a cottage in Finchley and found a printing operation with twelve thousand copies of pirated music. (Its overseer, one J. Puddefoot, complained in Gilbertian terms that the searchers were "straining at a gnat and swallowing a camel," since "they do worse on the Stock Exchange every day.") In March, Francis, Day and Hunter sued James and Arthur Childe of Islington, who had printed ten thousand copies in Hoxton and Islington. In October, a raid in Hackney yielded nearly 240,000 copies. In July 19 o5, another in the north London suburb of Dalston yielded over 280,000 from a warehouse rented by George Wotton on behalf of the king of the pirates. Subsequent raids across north London and the east end resulted in further big hauls: 6,5o o in Devons Road, i o,ooo in Upper Holloway. Off Goswell Road, a warehouse operated by William Tennent on behalf of "J. Fisher and Co." and selling by catalogue yielded 16o,ooo copies.41
Such numbers commanded attention. Parliament once again had to turn its attention to music piracy. January 1904 saw a series of hearings before a special committee convened to address the issue. As far as the facts of piracy were concerned, the committee heard little that was new. Those testifying before it included leading publishers, who attested to the extent and intensity of the problem. Both Abbott and Preston appeared, as did police officers, lawyers, and magistrates. But what was remarkable was that the "king of the pirates" himself, Willetts, volunteered to appear alongside them. He did so in his capacity as manager of the People's Music Publishing Company-a front organization that was based in the venerable book trade center of Paternoster Row. His testimony was recorded verbatim, and reported at length by the press across the country under headlines that repeated his claim that piracy was beneficial (even "good for piano trade," as one asserted).42 It was the first-perhaps the onlycomprehensive defense of piracy ever to be voiced by a self-proclaimed pirate king in a major center of political power.
Willetts seized his opportunity to the full. His defense addressed both the structure of music publishing as it then was, and the broader principles of musical culture to which it appertained. He began from the position that no author or composer should be given-or in fact had-a freehold on gifts that were God given for the public benefit. This was in principle non-controversial. For the first time, however, musical works really did redound to the general good. Willetts reminded the MPs that educational reforms in late Victorian society had only recently made musical proficiency part of the cultural makeup of every artisan and factory worker. This and the piano boom had created a market for sheet music that simply had never existed before. More than that, the new market (which Day had called the "number 2 market") remained fundamentally distinct from the more traditional market to which the legitimate publishers remained devoted. Unlike their purchasers, Willetts's were working class. They simply could not afford music priced at 18d per song-a price that he considered "extortionate." But they did not necessarily desire different and inferior kinds of music. Artisans as well as gentlemen, he insisted, bought music from Tannhdnser, Carmen, and William Tell (all of these being out of copyright). And in this he was right; Day had conceded that the pirates sold "a good quantity" of Chopin, Beethoven, and Wagner.43 All they wanted was music that was affordable. Willetts therefore argued that piracy of such songs at 2d had no significant effect at all on existing