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The parliamentary committee was not about to accept any of this. Willetts was subjected to aggressive questioning about the personnel involved in his operation (in stark contrast to the representatives of the established publishers, it maybe noted, to whose customary confidentiality the committee enthusiastically deferred). Understandably reluctant to reveal such sensitive details, Willetts ended his testimony in some disarray. With his departure the investigations came to an end. The committee then brushed him aside in its report and recommended that a stricter antipiracy law be passed. Unremittingly hostile to Willetts's claims, the report argued that piracy threatened the future of the music publishing industry and had to be combated. It urged giving the industry everything it wanted.

Yet Willetts's testimony did find some sympathetic hearers. Even the music publishers' own trade press conceded that it was a mistake to be so secretive. More significantly, the pirates had a major sympathizer in Parliament: a Glasgow MP named James Caldwell. Caldwell was a Radical who had made a fortune from calico printing-an industry with its own rich history of conflict over copyright piracy. He had been responsible for watering down the earlier law against music piracy, and had talked out two stronger bills in 1903-4. Now he once again mobilized to the same end, threatening to stymie the publishers' desired law.53 He used the hearings to advance his own report, explaining why the practice had arisen and what should be done about it. His account matched that of the king of the pirates at almost every point. Piracy was a substantial problem, Caldwell conceded, but it was driven by the "lawless and high handed" actions of the publishers acting as a trust. Their combination upheld high prices, producing a situation analogous to that of London's book publishers a generation earlier with respect to the United States. In each case the result had been entrepreneurship denounced as piracy. He endorsed the existence of a vast new working-class "number 2 market," and charged that the existing publishers were entirely neglecting it. This being so, Caldwell agreed that piracy might even serve to increase legitimate sales, because it demonstrated the popularity of a piece without appealing to elite custom- ers.54 Caldwell wanted this belief written into copyright itself, ideally by a compulsory-license clause similar to that in the patents statute. In effect, this would disaggregate copyright into two rights, of authors and sellers. The former would be protected while the latter was opened up.55

Caldwell and Willetts stood in profound conflict with everyone else represented. They alone maintained that copyright was not simply a matter of the private interest of the owner- a property likened repeatedly to that which a gentleman had in his watch. Preston for one endorsed this very high (and legally untenable) notion.56 The result was a pronounced desire to bring legal protections for copyright up to the same standard as those for more conventional theft-to raise piracy to a form of larceny. This would not be merely "natural progress," as one London magistrate had suggested, but, Caldwell insisted, a real transformation.57 He pressed witnesses again and again about their views of the nature of literary property itself, only to be told again and again that it was solely a matter for the owner. The public had no stake in it, pricing in particular being entirely a matter for the publishers. To Caldwell this high-handedness was the real explanation for why the industry was experiencing such difficulty. It would always be hard to enforce a law, he pointed out, to which "the general public sympathy" stood opposed.58At the same time, Caldwell insinuated that the "illegal proceedings" of the MCA had themselves increased piracy by "advertising" both the money to be made and the impunity of the pirates. Everything combined to persuade him that Parliament should be chary of giving