Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [223]
FIGURE 13.4. Post Office engineers' analysis of experimenters and listeners-in, compiled in May 1923. Sykes Committee minutes, POST 89/18, vol. 8, item 8. Courtesy of the Royal Mail Archives.
At the same time, Joynson-Hicks appointed a committee of inquiry to reexamine the whole enterprise of broadcasting from top to bottom. To encourage the company's cooperation in this unwelcome endeavor, he floated hints that if it were to prove recalcitrant then he might simply accept all applications for experimenters' licenses. Defining the entire nation as experimenters in the making, this would completely undercut its economic and cultural foundations. He wanted the BBC at least to accept a constructor's license at ios -half its own proposed price-and was prepared to take it to the brink of destruction to force this through. The company called an emergency meeting and denounced his "threat" as a "serious breach of faith."44 But there was nothing it could do. Less than six months after the BBC's launch, Jix had decided it was time to reform broadcasting root and branch. The crisis had come. There were other concerns too - the music publishers, for example, were up in arms against the company because they saw it as a reincarnation of the old sheet-music pirates.45 But the matter of the experimenter and pirate, everyone agreed, was "the all inclusive and great question" of the day. Everything else was "unimportant."
Joynson-Hicks's committee of inquiry met under the MP Sir Frederick Sykes in mid-1923. By now, as well as the thirty-three-thousand-odd applications for experimental status that were still in limbo, the BBC also feared that there were four or five unlicensed sets in use for every one licensed. Publicly the Post Office put the latter proportion at 1:1, but even that was bad enough to be fatal. In private meetings Jix acknowledged the true scale of the problem, and named it frankly: he "mentioned 200,000 and called them `pirates."'46The BBC remained convinced that almost all "experimenters" were in truth Jix's pirates in mufti. Although it wearily reiterated that it did not want to restrict "genuine experimenting," it wanted the Post Office to deny most of the applications it had already received, once more guessing that the number of real experimenters might be about five thousand. It suggested referring the applications to "any qualified technical authority"-its own engineering department would do-to certify them. In effect, it would rest its future on the professionalizing ethos of the engineers. By what criterion should such certification be carried out? "I can suggest a method," Noble said tartly: "Avery cursory glance." Ninety percent of the applicants were obviously unqualified, and a standardized refusal form should be sent to the rest. Brown agreed, saying that most applications were "camouflage."47 But few others were prepared to be so bluntly skeptical.
It soon became evident why. Dismissing applications was by no means as simple a task as Noble believed. Of the thirty-three thousand sorted by the Post Office engineers so far, "a considerable proportion" did cite some potentially relevant experience. As the panel probed Noble and McKinstry further, even they began to flounder in the face of hypothetical cases, and even undoubted experimental geniuses, who would not have made the grade. What about "a young man who is not yet a competent investigator or an experimenter," for example, "but who desires to become so, and may become so?" Noble suggested that such a person should buy a broadcast license and a BBC set, and get a "period of experience." But, as the panel quickly pointed out, the set would be boxed, so such a person could hardly do much experimenting to qualify himself. And from this emerged a further tricky problem. Everyone agreed that experimenters had to be free to access the entire range of available parts, to combine