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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.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. Did these "evil pirates" kill the music industry, as was proclaimed they would?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
This situation existed up until the printing press was invented. Before then, everything had to be copied by hand and a distributed system was the most effective way of doing this.
The temporary monopoly was to encourage people to invest in printing equipment and printing plates so they could mass produce copies cheaply.
The economics of the Gutenberg Press don't apply to the HP Laserjets of today though.
Not only that, but the USPO should start instigating deep package inspection because I'm sure that these illegal files are causing undue stress on the delivery infrastructure.
We're all hypocrites. We all have hidden parts, it's the contrast between them that make us more a hypocrite than others
The enormous amount of art produced between the dawn of Man and the institution of copyright about 500 years ago should stand a sufficient response to the industry's argument that disregarding copyright will destroy art.
This is modded funny, and I suspect that it was intended to be sarcastic, but it's really quite accurate. John Philip Sousa campaigned extensively against the record when it began, for fear that it would destroy the market for live performance.
Of course, it didn't eliminate it, but it did remove live performance as a reasonable way to gain income, since restaurants could now get ambient music essentially for free.
And of course, removing copyright from the equation would restore the performance industry to its former glory.
Many musicians, myself included, do just that. We release albums and other releases without any copyright restrictions and pay the bills with other jobs. Separating music from money removes any sense of making music just for money and shifts the focus back to the music. This may be bad for industry, but it is good for music.
In spite of this activity, literature still flourished in the ancient work. This is because the market depended on patronism. I wouldn't mind going back to those days, and to some extent we never left them. Indeed, most of the films and music I enjoy now are funded through a great deal of support from state arts ministries and private patrons. Record labels aren't so worried about piracy when the bills are already paid.
So privacy might make it harder for makers of the lowbrow to turn a profit. Boo-hoo. True art will continue to shine regardless of copyright laws.
Yes, because we all want boring post-modern "art" that amuses only jaded aristocratic farts. A return to patronism will only mean a return to pseudo-intellectual garbage that appeals only to a select few, or worse, to a government art committee.
Without popular art we won't have Twain, Dickens, Conan Doyle and every other great author that got started on magazine and newspaper serials. I know /.-ers like to feel superior and that it is all too easy to denigrate popular art, but you need to get a sense of history before making such a blanket statement.
In spite of this activity, literature still flourished in the ancient work. This is because the market depended on patronism. I wouldn't mind going back to those days, and to some extent we never left them. Indeed, most of the films and music I enjoy now are funded through a great deal of support from state arts ministries and private patrons. Record labels aren't so worried about piracy when the bills are already paid.
So privacy might make it harder for makers of the lowbrow to turn a profit. Boo-hoo. True art will continue to shine regardless of copyright laws.
But the arts have absolutely flourished with copyright. You're totally discounting modern films and large-scale video games, which wouldn't be possible without unbreakable DRM or copyright. In order to conduct art on a massive scale, the producers need to be able to recover their costs. You couldn't spend $100M on a project, if you could never recover the expense.
In addition to enabling the creation of such works, copyright has also provided tremendous financial incentive to produce these works. In the US alone, about $30B per year is spent on these two art forms. In addition to that, art has never been more available. We have public libraries that lend audio recordings, books, and films. Everyone in the United States is able to access electronic entertainment free of charge via radio and television. Art creation is no longer restricted to those patronized by the rich, but can be performed by anyone for the common person, as even the little guy can protect and profit from their work.
And just to defuse this argument before it starts, the one about what constitutes are, ask yourself this. If you were a (probably digital) archaeologist looking back to the mid 20th to early 21st century from 500 years in the future, do you think you would learn about our culture from Band of Brothers, From the Earth to the Moon, The Godfather, and GTA 4, or from a bunch of Pollock paintings?
You don't make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. - Winston Churchill
Many musicians, myself included, do just that. We release albums and other releases without any copyright restrictions and pay the bills with other jobs. Separating music from money removes any sense of making music just for money and shifts the focus back to the music. This may be bad for industry, but it is good for music.
Sure, if you do generic indie rock kind of music, which you can play after learning a few chords. But music requiring real skill requires a much bigger time commitment; besides just the actual performing for money part, there's also the intensive practicing part.
But the arts have absolutely flourished with copyright.
The arts have flourished. But can this be attributed solely or even mostly to copyright? Others that should not be discounted:
Technology has done way more than the law. It's arguable whether the law has helped or actually hindered the arts. And we're still missing technological advances. I'd like to see free digital signing services spring up. It'd be so easy to do, and would be a big help in preventing plagiarism and seeing that authors receive proper attribution.
You couldn't spend $100M on a project, if you could never recover the expense.
What sort of nonsense is that? Millions are spent all the time on projects with no expectation of a measurable profit. Typically it's done for less easily measured returns, and often it's called "charity". Or the returns are so far in the future that no business will try it, so other organizations have to do it if it's to be done at all. How do you compute the returns on a nice medieval church or the eradication of a disease or putting a man on the Moon?
Art creation is no longer restricted to those patronized by the rich
How can you think that? Some time in history, did some nation try to enforce a law that forbids people who make less than a certain income from creating art? Well of course you didn't mean that, but you are saying that art takes lots of money and that in the past people didn't have the resources, but now thanks to copyright they do. Again, you forget all the other things that have enabled more art. And, no, art doesn't have to take lots of money. Not even video need be expensive, not with good cameras so cheap these days and getting cheaper and better.
Intellectual Property is a monopolistic, selfish, and defective concept. It is "tyranny over the mind of man"
xcept, of course in this specific case (that you use to illustrate your general point) the 'piracy' was performed by a major player(Edison - believe it) and not joe pirate with ... some sort of nifty/cheap 1902-era film copying device.
So it seems to me that your point is that major companies are much more harmful to independents than li'l old pirates.
Not really, my point was to compare the situation at the dawn of the 20th century, when the only one that could do a filmmaker major economic harm by pirating his film was an evil mega-corp like the one run by Thomas Edison, with the movie piracy situation today. The sheet music piracy problem of 1897 is much closer in nature to today's music piracy problem. Both examples, however, illustrate that piracy either by a mega-corp as in Méliès case or a legion of individual pirates as in the case of the sheet music distributers could cause you, the content copyright owner, major economic harm even a century ago. Today, thanks to computers and the internet, pirate users are capable of doing just as much harm to a filmmaker as any evil mega-corp because any tom dick or harry can rip off your movie and make it instantly available to millions of people. Arguably the pirates today cause you more harm because you can sue a corporation for stealing your stuff, there is practically speaking nothing you can do to stop the pirates.
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow