Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [259]
FIGURE 15.1. Record counterfeiters caught by New York police in the early 196os..Stereo Review 24, no. 3 (February 1970): 6o.
It was replaced by home copying, made possible by cassette tapes. The cassette was not only a recording medium but a convenient, portable, and durable means of displacing music. Cassette players were as ubiquitous in homes as transistor radios. They had become a fixture in cars too, and in 1979 the SonyWalkman signaled their imminent ubiquity Such devices transformed the place and practice of listening, at the same time as they facilitated rerecording. Some commercial outfits were quite brazen in exploiting the possibilities: in Chicago, a store called Tape-A Tape successfully defended itself against Capitol Records. But with cassettes it was really noncommercial copying that troubled the industry. There was no precedent for understanding this practice, or for quashing it. The RIAA lost no time in warning that home copying was a bigger threat than commercial piracy. 19
As early as the i95os, audio manufacturers had tried to sell the idea of home recording as a hobby akin to photography. But only when cassettes arrived did a mass market emerge. From the outset Phillips adopted a policy of openness for the key patents, making the cassette a de facto universal standard. Teenagers adopted them wholesale, using transistorized, battery-powered recorders.20 Capitalizing on affluent teen culture, cassettes made possible a dynamic domestic world of constant recording and rerecording, swapping and reswapping. Someone could buy one copy of an LP, and a circle of friends each make a copy of it; or records could be borrowed from public libraries and copied. Or, of course, one could record one's own LPs for preservation purposes. And makers of "mix" tapes could feel themselves to be exercising a certain authorship. The problem of home taping was thus akin in some ways to that of pirate listening to radio in the 192os. It was a subtle, unostentatious practice that left few traces and allowed for a certain creative freedom on the part of what were otherwise seen as recipients. It could not easily be stopped without disproportionate police actions, and legislation offered no easy solution either. It was a problem at once of technology, place, and moral economy. Tape recorders were small, cheap, and simple to use. Recording could now be done in a garage, bedroom, or den. The cassette thus overturned the basic distinction between home and workplace so distinctive of the modern era. This was why the home came into focus in piracy conflicts once again.
All of these practices generated moral quandaries. But theywere indeed quandaries, not unambiguous sins. In 1972 the magazine Stereo Review asked its in-house philosopher and "demon tapester" to clarify the ethics of what it called this "great tape robbery." The tapester agonized that advocacy of home taping was symptomatic of a general malady of the day. Perhaps home tapers should be aligned with moral relativists and believers in "situational ethics" (a distant echo of Ruth Benedict's famous anthropological explanation ofJapanese conduct in the war). Maybe they resembled the antiwar "radicals" who thought that shoplifting was virtuous because they equated property with theft. Certainly, many of the magazine's own readers regarded the record industry as a claque of "robber barons" who deserved what they got. The tapester's own analysis complete with academic references and a nod to Kant-was that copying could rank anywhere from the benign to the criminal, depending on the circumstances. But when it mattered, he came down in favor