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By Root 2013 0

case until at least 1957. During that time the pirate RCA published a large number of discs, all claiming to have been recorded in Europe by orchestras, conductors, and soloists who turned out to have been either misattributed or entirely fictitious. The company's owner, however, was a known figure, who had in fact been a major player in the orthodox industry. Elliott (Eli) Oberstein was a one-time manager at the real RCA; he has plausibly been identified as the first artist's agent. After being eased out by internal rivalries he had gained access to troves of recorded performances by German musicians of the war and immediate postwar years, along with newer off-air recordings and some Soviet and Czech performances. Most were stored in what was now East Germany, often in the vaults of radio stations. They formed the basis of the discs that Oberstein's ersatz RCA now issued haphazardly in America. The Ring was his most ambitious feat, but he also undertook other grandiose projects, including a complete Boris Godnnov. The details have never been traced, but there are hints enough of subterfuge and shadowygo-betweens, and of a network of musical espionage that would probably now be impossible to reconstruct, to evoke Le Carre.17

The record piracy of the 195os was a commercial enterprise, but it was not only commercial. It arose from circles of expert enthusiasts forming distinct social groups-publics, as it were. They kept in touch by correspondence and through small-circulation subscription publications that were full of expert reviews and arcane information about pressings, performances, and personnel. They cultivated a sensibility of shared devotion to the higher cause of musical art. They created canons and the criteria to judge quality by. There was something very eighteenth-century about them: opera and jazz connoisseurs pursued what were, in effect, microscopic Kantian Enlightenments. Both indicted the record companies for being merely capitalist institutions, when they should and must be archivists in service to art. Their archives should be in public, where "public" meant their own communities: they demanded that the companies issue or license the discs, not that they market them to the masses. In short, opera and jazz buffs were prepared to countenance piracy or bootlegging because they held a normative view of what recording was.

When the companies clamped down, as far as they were concerned they observed a firm distinction. Piracy henceforth would mean the mass production of forty-fives, and be associated with payola, the Cosa Nostra, and, inevitably, loaded jukeboxes in NewJersey. In 1970 they supplied data implying that criminal piracy of these kinds had become a Sioo million per year industry. But what had happened earlier left the industry with a problem that this sharp distinction was not sufficient to remove. They were susceptible to revived charges that they disdained originality merit, and heritage, and that someone should step forward to perform the custodial function they neglected. Such perceptions were not always accurate or disinterested-the jazz pirates had preyed on independents' lists too. But they endured.

THE LINGERING DEATH OF MUSIC

After 1951-52, the record industry changed tack on piracy. It had always endorsed extending copyright to recordings, but now it coalesced to form the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) with an avowed antipiracy mission. The RIAA would both lobby for copyright and intervene in its own right to deter, prevent, and detect piracy. The manner in which it did this was from the outset similar to that ofArthur Preston. It hired its own agents, who operated largely outside public oversight or control, and used any legal tools it could think of. There might be "good pirates" and "bad pirates," as one interested party affirmed-only the bad ones were truly clandestine-but the RIAA went after both. As its campaigns gathered steam, meanwhile, a federal law criminalized outand-out record counterfeits. In 1966 New York outlawed the unauthorized commercial copying