Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [256]
The implications of RCA's humiliation were potentially far-reaching. Its willing involvement in what were clearly piratical pressings might well make it impossible for the company to prosecute the pirates. Since only a "gentleman's agreement" kept record companies from preying on each other's catalogues, the prospect of chaos loomed. Bolletino himself recognized and lamented this rather outlandish possibility. In the event, however, avery different crisis ensued. The American Federation ofMusi- cians decided to blacklist Bolletino's holding company, Paradox Industries, for not paying royalties to the artists whose records Jolly Roger pirated. Paradox truthfully (if amorally) pointed out that most of the performances had been cut at a time when royalty contracts for mainly African American jazz musicians had been virtually unknown, so there were no agreements to honor. Besides, it claimed to use its revenues from piracy to fund new recordings for which it did pay royalties. But the AFM held firm. The boycott cemented Paradox's identity as solely abootlegger. In early 1952, Columbia and Louis Armstrong (who, very unusually, had earned royalties since 1924) took the opportunity to file a suit against the company. Bolletino at first wanted to fight. Since records were not copyrighted, he believed, they must be "essentially public domain."13 But he soon thought better of the idea, and on February 7 he surrendered. That day, the entire culture of jazz piracy collapsed. The three main organizations -Bolletino's Paradox, the Century Record Company, andJazz- Time Records -all announced that they would cease bootleg operations forthwith. At one stroke all the recognized pirate vessels -Jazz Panorama, HJCA, BlueAce,Jazz Classics, Anchor, Viking, Emm-Ess, and Zee-Geewere scuttled.
Opera
Just as Record Changer revealedJolly Roger's coup against RCA, the middlebrow magazine Saturday Review published its own scoop about record pirating. It involved the first nationally prominent case of piracy in classical music. The recording was of Verdi's (In Ballo in Maschera. The label, Classic Editions, claimed it to be an Italian performance, but the Review exposed it as an imposter. In reality it was a "pirated reproduction" of a Metropolitan Opera House radio broadcast made in 1947. Strangely enough, this set too had been pressed at RCA's Custom Pressing unit, presumably at much the same time as jolly Roger's jazz discs. However, it was not the piracy as such but the subterfuge about attribution that seemed to anger the Review's writer most-principally because of the "contempt" it implied for music critics.14
It soon turned out that the pirate Ballo was not an isolated case. Operas were appearing on pirated discs fairly routinely. But the practice had significant differences from that in the jazz world. Unlike jazz, opera recordings generally did not derive from existingAmerican records. They came instead from obscure European sources-or, more often, from radio broadcasts. The practice depended on a different technology too. "Pirating has been given a big boost by magnetic-tape recording equipment," reported Time. Tape permitted pirates to record broadcasts and have their discs on the street in days, to be sold through secondhand record storesthus effectively creating an environment similarly febrile to, though much smaller than, that of the reprint industry of a century earlier.is Often, as with Classic's Ballo, recordings derived from transmissions of performances at the Met. In any case, pirated operas frequently disguised their origin by bearing attributions to unknown European artists. The practice became the particular habit of a concern calling itself the Wagner-Nichols Home Recordist Guild, which issued about twenty Met performances in all. Some piracies even came from radio stations' own acetates of such transmissions, which could yield surprisingly high quality.
As with jazz, there