• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2045 0

culled from the actual raids, court cases, and arguments of i9oo-i9o5. How it came to do so is not entirely clear. But it is certainly the case that Gainsborough had recruited many ex-music hall stars in the 1930s to appear in its screen comedies. One of them was the screenwriter and director of I'll Be Your Sweetheart, Val Guest. Guest had begun his own career as a songwriter for one of the music publishers in the wake of the Willetts episode. It seems that in devising his film he wrote up the stories that he had heard told in its corridors. And he transformed them, somewhat bizarrely, into propaganda. The music industry's first pirate war thus became a tale of the solidarity of commerce, creativity, and public-spiritedness against black marketeers and spivs.66

Guest's moralized retelling suggests the longer term significance of the campaign against the music pirates. The last-gasp victory of the publishers had rested on what was virtually a redaction into legal argument of Preston's pilgrimages across the land. The publishers won by finally confronting the fact that piracy was a matter not just of immorality, but of complex social networks with their own channels of communication and their own ideology The conspiracy charge succeeded, not by challenging the content of the pirates' networks, nor by seizing their products, but by identifying them as networks. So all those raids and seizures had not been so futile after all.They hadyielded something immeasurably more valuable than a million or two sheets of paper. What really counted were the tiny scraps of knowledge they had yielded. Together those scraps could be combined into a detailed understanding of piracy as a collective practice-and it was only when they were so combined that the pirates met their nemesis. Preston andAbbott had defeated Willetts, in effect, by replicating his own social knowledge.

In that light Preston and Abbott's historical significance lies in the institution they created: the first ever private police force dedicated to fighting piracy. There had been precedents for this, to some extent-one thinks of the agents sent across the land to track down piracies in the mideighteenth century But nothing resembling their drilled "commandoes" had ever been put into the field before. They took this initiative at the very moment when private detective agencies such as Pinkerton's were coming into their own inAmerica and Britain as entrepreneurial counterparts (and sometimes more) to the professionalizing police forces. Like them, Preston and Abbott had hit upon an opportunity that was not to go away. Their initiative marked the beginning of an alliance between business, intelligence, policing, and intellectual property that would endure long after their victory. Today, private antipiracy policing is a growth industry. It recruits ex policemen, as Preston and Abbott did, and it too has been known to pursue its quarry not just as pirates but as criminal conspirators. The modern pirate hunters propel policy and legislation too. In the early years of the twentieth century, the private antipiracy police raised serious questions about everyday rights and freedoms-questions that many at the time, including prominent legal officers, viewed as seriously as any concerning piracy itself. How far those questions remain pertinent today, in the context of avastly larger and more powerful antipirate industry, is something that should give all of us pause for thought.

Since the last years of the nineteenth century, new forms of communication and recording have proliferated as never before. Society has found itself having to accommodate not just one or two potentially revolutionary technologies, but an accelerating series of them: sound recording, radio, television, audio- and videotape, computers, digital media, the Internet. We are naturally accustomed to invoking the revolutionary importance of the most recent of these. But in the history of piracy there is a strong case for saying that the most transformative of all was an earlier device: radio. Radio broadcasting