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By Root 1874 0

publishers' sales, because the pirates addressed a sector of society that they neglected completely. Indeed, piracy might even increase the sales of the legitimate publishers, since it amounted to free advertising. Willetts claimed that David Day had confessed as much to him privately (both of these enemies occasionally hinted at remarkably candid conversations between them, as though the leading policeman and the leading pirate could have no secrets from each other). In other words, he insisted on the fractured character of the new mass culture at a time when others were content to extol its size.

But why were legitimate publishers insensitive to this enormous new market? Because, Willetts continued, theyhad evolved into a cozy, familial trust-a "ring"-dedicated to maintaining high and uniform prices by means of confidential collaboration.44 In order to maintain their place, the publishers made much of the importance of the authors and composers having sacrosanct rights, but it was not the authors and composers who decided how those rights were exercised; nor did they decree their rates of return. The publishers determined how the system worked in practice. In other words, they were implicitly acting in the tradition of the trade assailed by Babbage two generations earlier, by Donaldson in the eighteenth century, and byAtkyns in the seventeenth. And they had made their ruthlessness crystal clear by their illegal and violent actions against the pirates (Willetts liked to tease his opponents with that magistrate's line about "organized hooligans").45 But, Willetts now added, Parliament need not accept their conventions. For the sake of the new public interest that had now come into existence, changes must be made. The publishers' combine threatened "to really stop the musical education of the country."46

Willetts also advanced his own view of the nature of musical property itself, merging older criticisms of literary monopolies with his new notion of a mass public interest. Copyright was not a freehold, he insisted, nor a natural right. It had originally been a "liberty" or "privilege" conferred on an author by Parliament for the public's good, and it must return to that status. The proper analogy was not with real property at all, but with the kind of monopoly that Parliament might grant to a supplier of any public good, like a rail operator or a gas company. Such a monopoly did not give the operator an unrestrained right to charge whatever fares it wished, or willfully to restrict access regardless of the public interest. Arail company, for example, could not refuse to operate trains for all but the wealthiest portions of society, even though this might be the best policy for the company. In fact, Parliament routinely decreed that train companies must run services at prices that the people could afford, and at times they needed, in return for granting the monopoly. This was an extremely significant point for Willetts to make. It showed that he was versed in the antipatent campaign of MacFie and Armstrong a generation earlier, which had appealed to exactly the same practice in arguing for a form of compulsory licensing. (Ironically, cheap excursion trains now provided the ideal way to distribute Willetts's pirated music across the nation.)47 So this, Willetts maintained, was precisely what Parliament should do for copyright monopolies now. Where it had fostered the concept of cheap travel, so it should now foster the concept of cheap music, in the same quest for a cultured citizenry. There should be first-class and third-class editions of musical pieces, just as there were first- and third-class railway carriages. Both would get the punter to the same point, but with varying comfort levels en route. They would have different appurtenances (bindings, typography, and so forth) and would appeal to different markets. This, he pointed out, was precisely what Francis, Day and Hunter was already doing with its cheap music series-an idea that Willetts claimed had originally been his. (Interestingly enough, media conglomerates