Canadian Pirates Sell Spurious Songs — In 1897

Reservoir Hill writes "The NYTimes reported in their June 13, 1897 edition that 'Canadian pirates' were flooding the country with spurious editions of the latest copyrighted popular songs. 'They use the mails to reach purchasers, so members of the American Music Publishers Association assert, and as a result the legitimate music publishing business of the United States has fallen off 50 per cent in the past twelve months' while the pirates published 5,000,000 copies of songs in just one month. The Times added that pirates were publishing sheet music at 2 cents to 5 cents per copy although the original compositions sold for 20 to 40 cents per copy. But 'American publishers had held a conference' and a 'committee had been appointed to fight the pirates' by getting the 'Post Office authorities to stop such mail matter because it infringes the copyright law.' Interestingly enough the pirates of 1897 worked in league with Canadian newspapers that published lists of songs to be sold, with a post office box address belonging to the newspaper itself. Half the money went to pay the newspapers' advertising while the other half went to the pirates who sent the music by mail." The AMPA never dreamed of suing their customers, though.

Comments

The ruin of the music industry...

[Savage-Rabbit]

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Did these "evil pirates" kill the music industry, as was proclaimed they would?

It didn't ruin the music industry but it probably ruined any number of small composers and threw them to the mercy of big distributers who were the only ones that had the resources to defend against this sort of thing. Even back then piracy could ruin you or at least cause you significant economic harm. A classic example is the 1902 movie: "A Trip to the Moon" by Georges Méliès. The movie was stolen by agents of Thomas Edison and widely circulated in the US by Edison. This ruined Méliès plans to market his film in the US and Méliès never got a profit from this movie. Eventually Méliès was forced into bankruptcy and although the losses on "A Trip to the Moon" probably didn't help his bankruptcy was mostly due to aggressive anti competitive behavior by the big studios of the period. So perhaps the lesson is that there is not much difference between pirates and evil mega-corps from a small/independent artist's or for that matter a small software developer's point of view. Both cause you economic harm and if you are a small/independent artist or software developer you can therefore feel free to detest both equally.