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If this idea were to work, however, then existing copyright practices would need to change radically. Willetts wanted to decouple two central components of literary property. On the one hand, the pirate king professed strong and unequivocal support for the principle of rewarding authors or composers through income from sales-indeed, he pointed out that because it did not maximize sales the existing system often failed to provide a livelihood at all, citing the case of one composer reduced by the publishers to such straits that she died in a lunatic asylum. He insisted that composers would benefit more from the massively higher sales a mass-market cheap-publishing regime would produce. On the other hand, however, he defied the usual assumption that linking authorial incomes to the market must imply a power to restrict a piece's circulation. Instead he proposed that Parliament decree a statutory royalty. This would take effect along the lines proposed in MacFie's patents furor, and in fact recently enacted in qualified form in a new patent law.49 Anyone could reprint and sell a piece of music, on this account, but all who did so must pay the composer and author at the required rate. Only the most abysmal flops would fail to cover their own printing costs.50 Essentially, Willetts was arguing that apiece of music should be regarded as analogous to an invention under the antipatent campaigners' understandings. Or, more saliently perhaps, he was arguing that it was akin to a performance. In fact, the principle would at length be adopted to deal with the new technologies of recording and broadcasting.

In this context Willetts suggested that piracy had an important social function beyond serving the public interest directly. Not only did it bring cheap music to the commonwealth. Not only, too, did it employ thousands, at a time when "work is wanted." (The pirates liked to claim that copyrighted music tended to be printed abroad, whereas everyone accepted that theirs was done in London, although the mainstream publishers countered that it was done there by foreigners.) He also argued that it was a catalyst for legal change. Willetts maintained that such change was always slow and overdue, and tended to come about only through what he called "agitation"-another point learned, perhaps, from the patent wars. In Edwardian England piracy was the agitation that made the problems of mass musical culture manifest. It forced the need for new law into the public eye. When a mass market for cheap music was legitimated, the people would have the pirates to thank.

Day grudgingly conceded that the pirate king had a defensible-sounding ideology. "The pirates say that times have changed," he remarked. "They say they have been doing good work for the nation for the spread of music by doing what publishers ought to do."51 In testifying to Parliament, Willetts wanted to make piracy into orthodoxy. His campaign-as he saw it-would recalibrate commercial propriety around a new kind of mass market and a new kind of moral norm. Day could see the appeal of all this. But Willetts went too far. He did not want it to stop at music, but urged the parliamentary investigation to extend to books too. And it seems that others outside Parliament wanted this connection made too. At any rate, in a strange incident the significance of which is hard to judge, pirated versions of Kipling, and, more strikingly still, of Prime Minister Arthur Balfour's Economic Notes on Insular Free Trade, appeared on the streets at this very moment, the latter announcing itself as an educational initiative aimed at enlightening the masses. The book piracies were widely noticed and everywhere linked to the music debates. But if the intent was to provoke a revisiting of copyright in general, they had no immediate success. Willetts's own attempt to draw parallels was swiftly silenced, while his parliamentary allies suspected that the proposed extension to books was a scare tactic