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By this point the authorities had taken upward of three million copies of songs from the pirate king and lesser operators, to no obvious deterrent effect. On the contrary, the popular legitimacy of their enterprise seemed only to increase. The Daily Mail told its middle-class readers that the pirates had wrought a "revolution in the publication of music"- and announced the launch of its own series of cheap songs to take advantage of it.60 In early i9o5, moreover, the pirates took a further ominous step when Willetts formed a limited company. From now on he was personally insulated from many liabilities. However many copies the MPA and police might seize, he could be back in operation almost immediately

It was at this point that the publishers resorted to desperate measures once again. Boosey's ran a socialist candidate against Caldwell in his Glasgow constituency, in an attempt to split the vote and get a friendly Conservative elected in his place. That tactic failed. The industry then held a huge protest in central London to voice the antipirate cause. Parry and Elgar went along, joining with the publishers to launch a new alliance called the Musical Defence League. Then, in April i9o5, the mainstream publishers took the most drastic action of all. They announced that the problem of piracy had grown so severe and so endemic that they would no longer invest in publishing any new works. In effect, the entire music publishing industry shut down. "Mr Caldwell's triumph," it seemed, was "all but complete."61

THE CONSPIRACY

Alongside Willetts's sensational testimony and Caldwell's mischievous maneuvers, the House of Commons committee on music piracy also heard a new suggestion to counter the pirates. It was voiced quietly on January 20, 1904, by the veteran barrister Sir Harry Poland. Poland remarked that it might well not be practical to pursue the pirates for breaching copyright, for all the reasons that the publishers had articulated. But in the very act of banding together to perpetrate their deeds the pirates were, he thought, committing a real crime. They were engaging in a conspiracy. Although piracy was a merely civil offense, the law regarded conspiracy as a far more serious matter-one subject to severe penalties, including prison. It should certainly be possible to prosecute them for that.62

This comment by Poland reappeared as an almost casual aside in the committee's final report, submerged by its general recommendation for a new copyright law.63 But the line that the pirates might be "engaged in a common law conspiracy to infringe on rights of property" caught the attention of a lawyer named Percy Beecher. Beecher then mentioned the remark to William Boosey chiefpirate catcher of Chappell and Company. Boosey immediately saw a chance to damage the pirates. The evidence was already available, after all, from all those raids carried out over the past eighteen months. It had simply never been regarded as evidence before, because nobody had thought to pursue the act of organization in itself. Now it gave an opportunity for a real victory. And this possibility arose at a time when the pirates' use of a limited-liability company rendered even the existing strategies even more futile. Boosey decided to make the attempt.

The resulting trial began in December 19o5. The alleged conspirators included many men who had been the subject of raids in the previous eighteen months, and whose operations had proved to be linked. George Wotton, William Tennent, John Puddefoot, and William Wallace were charged with conspiracy to print, publish, and sell copyrighted materialbut the main target was their leader, Willetts. Together they had worked as James Fisher and Co., a company name registered in January 1904 under the names of Puddefoot and Wallace, plus several others who seem to have been entirely fictitious. There was no doubt that Willetts was the real force behind the organization. Their hearing took seven weeks, with over fifty witnesses