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By Root 2095 0

but by many smaller "independents," staffed by dedicated enthusiasts. And, second, both their audiences, while relatively small, were intensely devoted to the music.Theywere also expert about it, sometimes obsessively so. They were collectors as much as listeners. They foraged in yard sales for obscure Jelly RollMorton discs or Lauritz Melchior performances, dreaming the Enlightenment dream of building "libraries" that might attain universality and completeness within their chosen spheres. They recognized canons of "classics" in those spheres, which required pristine pressing and special handling. In both jazz and opera, pirate recording was aimed at this peculiar kind of audience. The pirates themselves, moreover, were members of the same audience and shared its predilections. Theywanted to make money, but theywere in business for more than profit alone. They justified their actions in terms of furnishing a public archive of classics. The major companies, they charged, had neglected these classics so severely that an artistic heritage risked disappearing altogether. That corporate neglect furnished moral legitimacy for their own actions.

That said, however, jazz and opera manifested significantly different justifications for piracy. In the case of opera, the major pirates sought to create access to performances that were either new-broadcasts of live occasions-or unknown because they had been lodged in East German or Soviet bloc archives. (One or two advertised their refusal to pay royalties as striking a blow against communism.) In the case of jazz, the issue was largely one of restoring access to classics that were out of print. Jazz aficionados charged that the large recording companies adopted a "dog in the manger" attitude to their own backlists, not only declining to republish existing great art themselves but refusing others permission to do so. (Their complaint bears a pronounced resemblance to that of scholars today faced with the similar attitude of book publishers to their own outof-print titles.) The so-called battle of the speeds that erupted in the late 1940s between seventy-eights, forty-fives, and LPs was central to this accusation. As the new formats came in, so recordings published as seventy-eights would have to be reissued. The major labels were reluctant to undertake the task. The battle was proving disastrous for them, as consumers hesitated, awaiting the outcome, and sales slumped. They saw no reason to invest in reissuing music that they knew could not be profitable given their overheads. So the pirates did it themselves. Accusing the major companies of betraying a "public trust," they made and sold their own re-pressings. In their eyes, their piracywas principled. It was a service to civilization.

jazz

Unauthorized copying of records was almost as old as records themselves. As early as 1898 a police raid in Chicago found cylinder-duplicating machines concealed in a room behind a door marked with a skull and cross- bones.4 For decades such practices benefited from a peculiar quirk about copyright in recordings that endured from 1909 until the 197os.5 While a song's words and music - the written composition - could be copyrighted, and a disc could not legally be "duped" (directly copied), a recorded song could be reperformed, recorded, and sold, provided a compulsory royalty were paid. In practice the status of recorded music as property was even more unstable than that implies in the 1920s-194os, being highly contingent on factors like race and region. Independents like the Chess brothers in Chicago paid little or no attention to copyright (or performing right, for that matter). Nor, for black artists, did the performers' collection society, ASCAP. The expropriative relations that prevailed between companies and African American artists are today notorious. Only in the 1950s did Chess and other companies realize what theywere missing, and scour their lists to copyright everything they could. Similarly, the industry long turned a blind eye to unauthorized copying. Insiders jocularly referred to