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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.
It turns out that my great grandfather was involved in the sheetmusic pirate trade. Actually, he was involved in beaver skinning and general supply chain stuff in the Great Lake area of Quebec and later Manitoba as the pioneers headed westward.
He had two sayings, that are still repeated in my family. "Your customers will buy whatever you sell them, because they don't have a choice." and "What no one finds out you're doing, they aren't going to complain aboot."
While it's certainly not so much true today as it was in those frontier days, the marketplace is still a monopoly in many ways for many types of products. It's only those "customers" who can either forego some product or generate it themselves that can avoid buying from sellers like grampy.
Nowadays with the near instantaneous ability to copy and distribute ephemeral works like music, more and more customers are falling into that latter category of "generating it themselves". Those sellers who want to make a profit off of these pioneers aren't going to see a loon.
I think these PaperSharing M2M(Mailbox2Mailbox) systems which allow just anyone to swap files, folders and even whole books should be banned immediately before they destroy all that is good and pure with our country!
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.
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