Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [215]
The Post Office opted to fund this enterprise by a combination of two sources. One was a royalty charged on every set sold to the public. This would pay for capital expenditure on transmitters and plant, and would expire once those costs were met. Rates varied for different sets, but were substantial: they ranged from 7s 6d for a crystal set to 45s for a threevalve set.13 Partly to secure this income, for at least eighteen months only British-made receivers were to be sold, and only BBC members could make them. They must be manufactured to designs approved by Post Office engineers, and an official decal must be displayed on each set to confirm this. Certain components too-valves, headphones, and speakers-had to bear this mark. Kellaway had been reluctant to exclude foreign competition, fearing charges of protectionism; and the move did prove controversial. But he finally endorsed the arrangement. It seemed "reasonable and defensible" in the face of cheap imports from European countries with devalued currencies, and from an American trade brought to a juddering halt by ether chaos. And there was a major technical rationale too. The requirement served the need to minimize an annoying resonance effect known as oscillation. When oscillation occurred, a listener's equipment experienced what later would be called positive feedback. The aerial would then reradiate and produce interference for receivers across the surrounding area. Much more than interference by unlicensed stations, it was the characteristic "howl" of oscillating receivers that in practice threatened ether chaos in the United Kingdom. If oscillation derived from poor-quality or mismatched parts, then, it was surely appropriate to empower Post Office engineers to counter the menace.14
The second funding source was a license fee paid annually by all owners of receivers. This income was to be devoted to programming costs, so the policywas open-ended. The new "broadcast licenses," as theywere called, could be bought at Post Offices anywhere for ios, half of which would go to the company. They authorized their holders to use approved receivers to listen in to signals transmitted by BBC stations. They did not authorize the use of non-British components, nor non-BBC sets. A license holder could not legitimately use the equipment for other purposes, nor for other listening. And while the combination of stamp and license did not expressly forbid people from opening up their sets and tinkering with them, the intentwas certainly to convey the impression that doing sowas frowned upon.
In planning for the new system, officials assumed that two hundred thousand of these broadcast licenses would be sold in the first year. Everything depended on that figure being met. But how many Britons would pay for authorized receivers if German or French imports cost much less? And, more importantly, how many would buy licenses-especially if they were being asked to stump up higher prices for receivers too? Nobody knew the answers to these questions. If the population were indeed to prove recalcitrant, moreover, then enforcing either rule would be extremely difficult. On the answers to these questions-and especially the second-would depend the fate of British broadcasting. Looming over the whole scheme, in short, was the third problem that Gill had identified at the outset. He had signaled it in the agenda for that first meeting by an entry consisting of three cryptic words: "as to pirates."15
PIRATES AND EXPERIMENTERS
The first broadcast licenses went on sale in November 1922. At much the same time the new company came into being. The