Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [226]
FIGURE 13.5. Secret Wireless's antipirate device. UK Patent 261,847 (1925-26), "Improvements in or relating to means for wireless communication." Crown copyright.
Oscillation was a real problem and a perennial complaint. It could make the experience of listening intolerable. The BBC retained files full of complaints about it from towns across the country. Indeed, senior staff had several embarrassing experiences when they tried to demonstrate radio in provincial towns, only to find oscillation drowning out the signal. All they could do on such occasions was wait as patiently and apologetically as they could until the unknown offender got bored and switched off.
From soon after its creation, the company began calling on the Post Office to take action against oscillation. The problem was that of the four possible strategies to address the problem, all seemed either impracticable or impolitic.
The first strategy was to use police and Post Office inspectors to track down perpetrators of oscillation. If the oscillator had a license, that was easy, because the license authorized officials to inspect the holder's equipment. Noble suggested mounting a demonstration, on the basis that "sometimes [Britons'} honesty must be stimulated by a prosecution." But the assumption was always that the worst oscillators would be license pirates. Countering them therefore involved sending officers into their houses without prior consent to conduct searches. That threatened the same constitutional freedom as had exercised press pirates in the seventeenth century and music pirates in the Edwardian era. It would take only one or two cussed individuals to proclaim a trespass on the household for the exercise to become more trouble than it was worth-especially with a hostile press lying in wait. The Daily Mirror was already talking of inspectors "invading the Englishman's home" to snoop into all aspects of life-food, clothing, dogs, leisure, literature, and now wireless. And the Daily Express quickly picked up on the possibility and took delight in printing cartoons portraying the "wireless pirate" as a defenseless little everyman victimized as a serious criminal (fig. 13.6). Components manufacturers chipped in too, explicitly aligning the broadcasting police with the Stuart absolutism of the seventeenth century against which parliamentary rule had defined itself.
House-to-house inspectionswere inconceivable, the authorities quickly conceded. Theywere "outside the pale of practical politics." But to refrain from enforcement altogether was impossible too; it would amount to reviving the "dispensing power of the Stuart Kings."56 So the Post Office did in fact try policing. Trial runs took place in January 1923, right at the beginning of the moratorium on experimenters' licenses. Bournemouth was the first place chosen.57 This effort produced the evidence cited before Sykes as to the numbers of unlicensed receivers. But detection of violators proved tricky, and nobodywanted a trial.58 According to the law, "pirates" were liable to up to a year in prison with hard labor, but only one case had gone to court by mid-1923, and the culprit was fined £2.
The few accounts of piracy prosecution that did appear showed the need for caution. One concerned aJ. W. Sheriff, of that epitome of respect able suburbia, Cricklewood. In March 1923, at the climax of the crisis, Sheriff wrote to the postmaster general declaring that as a "student of history" he believed the restrictions on radio sets to violate the Monopolies Act of 1624. Legally, Sheriff was on thin ground, but the solicitor general advised that it might be better on the whole not to press the issue, and he was not