Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [252]
In practical terms, piracy in a house was all but impossible to police. The domestic threshold constituted a line of demarcation between the street and the home, which was supposed to be impervious to surveillance. In early modern London, tradesmen and -women asserted that this autonomy originated in the Magna Carta, and was thus a matter of the highest constitutional importance. They appealed to it consistently to deny constables permission to enter and search their premises, and not infrequently they won their cases when they did. There were few more incendiary requests in that incendiary age than the Surveyor of the Press's for a general warrant that would have trumped the householders' claims. This association of domesticity with propriety and autonomy survived the Industrial Revolution, moreover, when work is usually reckoned to have been displaced out of the home. It was still at issue in the Edwardian era, whenArthur Preston's agents muscled their way into houses in search of pirated music. Pirate listeners in the 1920S invoked the sanctity of the home too. In each case they raised the specter of state officials barging in and arresting children. This prospect was everywhere identified with tyranny. In the mid-twentieth century the association became still more frightening: it was a sign of totalitarianism.
Home piracy thus remained something of an oxymoron. Classically, if something took place in the home, then it was not piracy. Yet the home was of course not a static entity It was increasingly identified as a female sphere, and one open to colonization by new technologies-washing machines, air conditioners, refrigerators, telephones, and radios.3 By the seventies the home had been reinvented and proclaimed the site of some technological utopia or other many times over, while never losing its moral centrality But it was a domesticity of leisure now. Even the highest utopianism of the era never envisaged the home recovering its old, early modern place as a locus for creative production. That distinction between home and work-central to definitions of modernity since at least Max Weber-remained sacrosanct. But it became entirely conventional for domestic technological sublimity to come with a Stepford-style sting in the tail, or a Midwich cuckoo or two. Invasion and insurrection lurked there. Home piracy would take on aspects of both.
In the early 19705 the oxymoron began to dissolve. It did so, paradoxically, because of a sudden decrease in music piracy Organized, commercial piracy-the large-scale clandestine copying of recordings for sale-had suffered a series of defeats at the hands of police forces. As it retreated from prominence, so the extent and impact of casual domestic copying was thrown into sharper relief. The music industry decided to move against home tapers as quasi-pirates. But home copying had already acquired a distinct halo of civic virtue. It came only partly from the status of the home itself. An expressly moral enterprise of rerecording had appeared a generation earlier among two distinct but related groups of connoisseurs. Their efforts had fostered a perception among a small but dedicated community that the industry was hopelessly addicted to "big business" practices, and that those practices endangered the creation, circulation, and above all preservation of art. They had made piracy an exercise in conservation, sanctified by the amateur virtues of dedication and disinterest. The assault on home taping would have the ironic effect of reviving that conviction and raising it to the status of conventional wisdom.
THE MORAL ECONOMY OF MUSIC PIRACY
The perpetrators of this moral piracy in the I95os were aficionados of two musical genres at first sight as different as could be: jazz and opera. But the genres shared two major characteristics. First, each was catered for not just by huge record companies (principally the duopoly of RCA Victor and Columbia)