100 Years of Copyright Hysteria

Nate Anderson pens a fine historical retrospective for Ars Technica: a look at 100 years of Big Content's fearmongering, in their own words. There was John Philip Sousa in 1906 warning that recording technology would destroy the US pastime of gathering around the piano to sing music ("What of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"). There was the photocopier after World War II. There was the VCR in the 1970s, which a movie lobbyist predicted would result in tidal waves, avalanches, and bleeding and hemorrhaging by the music business. He compared the VCR to the Boston Strangler — in this scenario the US public was a woman home alone. Then home taping of music, digital audio tape, MP3 players, and Napster, each of which was predicted to lay waste to entire industries; and so on up to date with DVRs, HD radio, and HDTV. Anderson concludes with a quote from copyright expert William Patry in his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars: "I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."

Comments

Let me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let me be the first to say, "no duh".

The have fought and lost

[crovira]

The RIAA (and later the MPAA,) have fought EVERY single innovation that even looks like it might possibly impinge on their clients' business turf, right up until it becomes overwhelmingly clear that they're actually preventing their client's from making more money than if they kept their head in the sand.

If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens.

They are a creation dating from before the invention of democracy and all they have ever done is behave like it.

Re:The have fought and lost

[ledow]

Sheet music is possibly the most *highly* guarded copyright work that I've ever had to deal with. It's unbelievable, the licensing behind it.

Re:The have fought and lost

[noundi]

The RIAA (and later the MPAA,) have fought EVERY single innovation that even looks like it might possibly impinge on their clients' business turf, right up until it becomes overwhelmingly clear that they're actually preventing their client's from making more money than if they kept their head in the sand.

If it was up to the **AAs, we would be copying sheet music for our spinets with sharpened quill pens.

They are a creation dating from before the invention of democracy and all they have ever done is behave like it.

It's easy to persuade people into harming themselves, just play on their ignorance and pride, tell them that it "harms the economy" and they'll run miles for you.
 
About harming the economy. Whose economy? Mine or yours? (not you crovira, I'm referring to RIAA, MPAA etc.) Because from my perspective it seems to be a good deal. And if you're telling me that music or movies or even culture will stop to exist, I have a feeling you're just full of fucking shit and I'm willing to bet you any sum you want on the opposite. Now nobody in the industry would ever dare to make that bet since they know that they are just -- that's right -- full of shit.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.

Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music, but I don't cry about it anymore than I cry that the horsewhip or candlestick makers no longer exist. Some forms of technology are obsolete and have been replaced by better forms, like direct recordings from far-off places.

Actually I do lament that fact that our culture has become one of passive engagement with music, and for the matter sport. Obviously this doesn't apply to everyone but by-and-large most people listen to music rather that create music, most people watch sport rather that play sport. But I don't think that the various content industries share this sentiment, quite the opposite in fact as the entire content ownership and distribution system relies on the commoditisation of culture

Re:The have fought and lost

[Chrisq]

Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.

Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music

No we do it in Karaoke bars.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Acer500]

Good thing we have sheetmusictorrent.

Actually it looks like John Philip Sousa's prediction was correct. We Don't sit-around home pianos in our parlors listening to somebody music

No we do it in Karaoke bars.

And Guitar Hero and the like.

Not to mention that, in addition to those that these games inspired to pick up an instrument, it's always been popular (at least over here) to learn guitar or an instrument.. (which more often than not, lies forgotten shortly after said studies are finished or interrupted, until a new generation picks it up).

Re:The have fought and lost

[elrous0]

But what shall become of my beloved ice man when this new "refrigeration" catches on? What of him!?!?!?

Re:The have fought and lost

[Nadaka]

A guitar are for picking up chicks in high school and college, it always have been, it always will be. The difference between a professional and an amateur is that the professional keeps picking up high school and college chicks until he gets to old to rock out.

Re:The have fought and lost

[jedidiah]

Performing is not "creating music". All of the "creation" is
being done by the guy that wrote the original bit of sheet
music. So we are not that much more passive than we already
were. We're just no longer in the practice of making our own
mediocre performances at home based off of works that are
sufficiently dumbed down.

Re:The have fought and lost

[JediTrainer]

The RIAA (and later the MPAA,) have fought EVERY single innovation that even looks like it might possibly impinge on their clients' business turf

Hate to break it to you, but I think this sort of thing is way more common than just being limited to these industries. Big business and/or unions have fought innovation that they see as being counter to their interests all the time. Case in point, the Postal Codes in Canada - OMG all the mail sorters will be out of work!

Re:The have fought and lost

[Xiterion]

While it's true that simply performing is nowhere near the same as writing the music in the first place, there is quite a bit of expression to be had in simply playing a piece of music. I think there's something to be said for the accomplishment of learning your favorite song well enough to play it.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Ihmhi]

To quote Col. Potter, "Horse hockey!"

Nowadays, instruments are cheap and ubiquitous. With a midi board and GarageBand, you can come up with almost anything you can imagine.

I, for one, am terrible with transcribing music. Like my father I'm the "play by ear" type - I need to hear it to play it. So when I come up with a tune, I put it all together in GarageBand with the simple midi instruments. Once I feel I've got it to the right basic sound, timing, etc. then I get on real instruments and record it.

As for performing, I haven't seen any shortage of musicians or street performers lately, and a cursory stroll through YouTubeville will show that there are millions of musicians out there of all skill levels who are performing for the whole world to see.

Re:The have fought and lost

[ShieldW0lf]

If you get a bunch of people together to jam, record everything, then sit around drinking beer and listening to the recording, laughing at the bad parts and gathering up the cool parts so you can polish them into something tight next time, that's just as creative as sitting around writing sheet music alone in a quiet room, if not more so.

Most of my favorite recorded songs have my voice and my harmonica in them. Every time I listen to them, I think of good times and old friends.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Java Pimp]

I find it interesting that gathering around the piano to sing music was used as an argument against recording technology, yet today they would consider it public performance and demand royalties. (At least that's the direction things seem to be heading.)

Re:The have fought and lost

[Anonymous Codger]

Spoken like a person who has never performed music. Every musician worth his salt creates a new and original interpretation of the composer's music. Even the amateurs gathered around the parlor piano were doing something creative within the framework of the composition.

Re:The have fought and lost

[rlk]

Performing and composing are different, but one's not "less" or "more" than the other.

Aside from the fact that a lot of forms of music are improvisational, which is a form of creating something new, performing itself requires skill and (in most cases) collaboration with others and is expressive, from the choice of music to the tempo, shaping of the phrases, and indeed individual notes.

Re:The have fought and lost

[Enter the Shoggoth]

...music and sport are both things that everyone should be encouraged to enjoy. By setting up both activities as something that should only be actively pursued by those with elite levels of talent you are pandering to the moneyed interests within our society that aim to steal culture from us and then charge us to passively engage in it.

Well, seriously, I think it's a little premature to take it this far.

Last I heard, Little League was still going strong and "soccer mom" is a familiar idiom to any American. I don't see lack of talent stopping any teenager from picking up an electric guitar or a drum machine (not least of all the world's most popular bands).

Sure, commercial music publishing companies love the idea of offering up musicians as "rock stars," but even back in the 1800s you had Charles Dickens traveling the country, giving readings of his novels. Few people give him the credit for destroying the American pastime of reading books, though.

I can see this turning into and endless rally of comments, but I'll try again:

I am not saying that a proportion of the population doesn't engage in either sport or music but in the case of music it is far from a majority and in the case of sport it is something that children do but adults don't - how much of the adult population do you honestly think participates in regular sporting activities.

Besides which I was defending my original post against jedidiah's complaint which seemed to me to be posing the argument that that unless you're extremely talented you shouldn't participate. (apologies to jedidiah if that is not what he was trying to say)

Oh! and yeah thanks for making the discussion USA-centric- apologies to all those Americans on slashdot who aren't guilty of this but you've managed to yet again alienate the large number of people here who are not American (me included)

Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[betterunixthanunix]

As technology improves, we are eventually going to forget about copyrights; the laws might remain on the books, and big corporations will be busy suing each other over copyrights, but the average citizen will no longer be affected by them. We are almost there already; high school and college students download music and movies without a thought to copyrights, and share the files with their friends. Once they grow up, copyrights will have virtually no meaning for the average person in society.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[commodore64_love]

Here's what Thomas Jefferson (found of the democratic party) and James Madison (author of the Constitution) said about it:

"Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society. It would be curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain, could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called an idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of every one, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it.

"Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of it. He who receives an idea from me, receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me. That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property."

Madison -

"But grants of this sort can be justified in very peculiar cases only, if at all; the danger being very great that the good resulting from the operation of the monopoly, will be overbalanced by the evil effect of the precedent; and it being not impossible that the monopoly itself, in its original operation, may produce more evil than good." Sounds like Mr. Madison was talking about RIAA.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[Kokuyo]

Heh. When you manage to write three consecutive sentences without the use of the word 'fuck' we'll talk about you being allowed to call other people's posts 'drivel' again, okay?

Of course he's a troll but let's get over the same old arguments again, shall we?

Isn't it true that today, you don't need to be tech-savvy to get media for free? Is it not true that even if you had to be tech-savvy, EVERYONE knows someone who is?

If it therefore were true that, with media illegally being available for free, everyone would stop paying for it, then there couldn't possibly be any music recording studio or movie company left. Today.

The fact remains that only socially inept assholes don't pay for entertainment they enjoy (or people who don't have the money anyway). Those people always have the drive to smooch off of someone else. The technology has never mattered and will never matter. Those people don't pay, no matter the DRM. They are not lost sales due to P2P, they are lost sales, PERIOD.

There will always be people creating entertainment without getting rich in mind. Those are, arguably, the good entertainers. So I say kill copyright. Perhaps then the only thing remaining will be stuff that isn't the same old shit over and over again. After all, without any direct monetary incentive, those media conglomerate bastards just might not see the point in producing shit anymore. One can always hope, eh?

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[ledow]

"Without copyright how... do you think movies, music, games and software are going to remain viable endeavours?"

The answer is: the same way they did before and are doing now. "Piracy" is at its highest, if statistics are to be believed, but so are profits of all the above - in fact the proportions are greatly in favour of vastly *more* money being made now even with higher piracy. Movies, music, games, software = multi-billion dollar industries. One of the top-40 hits in the UK at the moment is by someone who sang along to YouTube vids. *With* copyright enforcement, she would be nothing now (and probably owe several thousand pounds of licensing fees), and we'd be at least one artist down. She's not the first and won't be the last. Most musicians give away or sell their music every day without a problem. It's only the "big" ones that do so for enormous profit and are *actually* represented by these organisations.

I have a friend who is in a relationship with a professional rapper. They don't make much money but they make enough. And all their music is just sitting on Myspace. It's got a Paypal button to let you buy a CD, but their stuff is original, good and given away on YouTube, MySpace and other sites. I don't think they've suffered under the current rates of piracy - I think they'd be nowhere without the exposure that giving their music away brings them.

It works both ways and it is, basically, an artform, not a business. It's like saying "without blue paint, how can artists thrive?!"... they did, for thousands of years, and still do and still would if all the blue paint disappeared. We didn't need blue-paint rationing, or companies telling us that blue paint is the express domain of artists, etc. Copyright is merely a tool to commercialise an artform. There are many ways of doing that, including just giving the damn things away to build a reputation to later release a real piece of art for huge profit.

And, unfortunately, copyright works both ways. If I want fair-use snippets, if I want to license them, if I want to do other things, there's no reason to stop me or make it prohibitively expensive - it's poor business. Ever tried to do this "officially"? Try and ask permission from a record company to use a song on a YouTube vid, or in a school play - see what assurances and what pricing structure they want to give you (I have, in the past, been quoted "per viewer" figures!). It's nothing to do with business, it's about controlling the media so that they can *tell* you what to buy next week (i.e. their next "up-and-coming" artist).

Copyright is already seriously lessened. Children are taught by otherwise-educated teachers to just "paste in something from Google images" which is a potential breach of so many copyrights in an hour's lesson that it's unbelievable. School plays are run off someone's iPod where they've downloaded relevant music and video. Kids share videos, music, ringtones, applications, etc. indiscriminately. It's already a lost cause unless you want to start criminalising everyone from toddlers to grannies. Give it a few decades and it will swing one way or another - you won't be able to make a piece of music without "enforcing" everything to do with it, or you won't be able to sell a piece of music at all. Both are absolutely terrible circumstances, but because of naive business practices, the artform is dying.

I should feel sorry for the smaller artists, for whom copyright is designed to help thrive, but in actual fact they are doing quite well enough on their own and will probably be the winners in the end. I think they've got the tech that replaces the need for the legislation now, so I wish them well. Music, especially, is part of life now. There were several decades of being able to commercialise that and almost every country in the world decided it was better to penalise that instead. Hence, the position now is that people really don't care any more. I don't know anyone who bought *every* song on their iPod.

I've bought t

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[commodore64_love]

And their Copyright Act of 1790 said the following:

- for the encouragement of learning
- limited term of 14 years with 14 year extension if the *original* author was still alive
- libraries, colleges, and private individuals were not subject to the copyright (i.e. fair use)
- was only for expensive works like books, not incidentals like maps or charts

This is the kind of copyright law we should have today, not the perpetual copyright that lasts ~100 years (five generations). When the original laborer who created the work dies, then the copyright should die as well. As Jefferson said "the Earth is for the living not the dead," and laws exist to serve the current generation not previous generations.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[serveto]

As technology improves, we are eventually going to forget about copyrights;

The way things are going, it looks like you're right. They're going to be completely forgotten, right about the time people start completely forgetting their moral obligation to pay the artist. That's right about the time that culture will (almost) completely be wiped out.

So true, look at how there was no culture at all before copyright.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[commodore64_love]

>>>The production of a quality map or chart has a higher cost than the production of a work of fiction

Yes TODAY it's more expensive, but that wasn't the case in 1790 when this law was passed. Running off a map lithograph on your printing press was trivial compared to the labor required to typeface an entire book, letter-by-letter. Copyright was later extended to maps/charts/sheetmusic in the 1890s.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[selven]

I agree with short copyright but making it based on the life of the author is a bad idea. First of all, and this is the most obvious drawback, it encourages murder. Secondly, it's not well suited to handle works made by multiple people (a subset of this being a corporation).

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's what Thomas Jefferson (found of the democratic party)

You do realize that the democratic party of his time was completely different then the one that exists today right? As in completely different ideals.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[Anonymous Codger]

They made music in the '80s? I thought the music died when that plane crash took Buddy Holly, et. al.

Re:Copyrights are going to be forgotten

[Wildclaw]

Ideally a copyright would be exactly the bare minimum that was required to get the author to create his work

Why is it that one question is always forgotten when talking about copyright incentives. And that would be, "Do we need to have that specific work created in the first place?". Do we need xxxxx number of songs produced yearly, or could we make do with less, in favor of spending more resources elsewhere instead.

Always remember that the real cost of copyright is the reduced spread of information. Sure, we may get more information produced, but the total spread of that information goes down. Is the information that gets produced via copyright so much better that it is worth the cost?

Sousa was right.

[LaminatorX]

Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music. They still exist, obviously, but have nowhere near the cultural prominence or respect that they once did.

Re:Sousa was right.

[eldavojohn]

Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music. They still exist, obviously, but have nowhere near the cultural prominence or respect that they once did.

Yeah, after reading the Sousa piece it was shockingly levelheaded and highly rational. He even admits he's an alarmist and that he has a biased view because of his personal stake in this. The last paragraph included in the Ars image is downright prophetic:

It cannot be denied that the owners and inventors have shown wonderful aggressiveness and ingenuity in developing and exploiting these remarkable devices. Their mechanism has been steadily and marvelously improved, and they have come into very extensive use. And it must be admitted that where families lack time or inclination to acquire musical technic, and to hear public performances, the best of these machines supply a certain amount of satisfaction and pleasure.

He almost sounds like a cautious promoter or early adopter himself! Unsurprisingly the Ars article only gives us the first sheet of a lengthy opinion that can be found here. Good reading to realize that these debated issues today are nothing new.

Re:Sousa was right.

[Thaelon]

Recording technology and radio obliterated small-scale performances and local music.

You don't get out much, do you?

Where I live there is live music available somewhere in the town every single day of the week. In fact, I went to a music festival Sunday that was going on all weekend long. I believe it was called Rocktoberfest and had 98 local bands?

What you're seeing is natural competition for people's time that every source of entertainment from naval gazing to youtube, to video games, to movie theaters. It's not that recording technology and radio obliterated small scale stuff. It's that there's so much else to do.

Re:Sousa was right.

[LaminatorX]

I do get out (and play out) just fine, thank you. :) There's music being played and heard, certainly. Just the same, when was the last time you were walking down the street and saw a family sitting on their front porch playing and singing together?

and he was right

[gbjbaanb]

There was John Philip Sousa in 1906 warning that recording technology would destroy the US pastime of gathering around the piano to sing music

you got to admit it, the guy predicted that correctly!

The others referenced in the summary, not so good. The music industry didn't implode after cassette tapes appeared, there's no reason to think the movie industry will implode now bittorrent's appeared either.

Do not forget the systematic abuse of the law.

[Therefore I am]

The RIAA use of stand-over tactics, mostly sanctioned by courts that failed the little man, is an innovation. . . . . . . They will be swept away in time and few will mourn their passing.

I can think of one!

[Arancaytar]

"I cannot think of a single significant innovation in either the creation or distribution of works of authorship that owes its origins to the copyright industries."

DRM!

Oh, wait...

Their problem now...

[MikeRT]

Is that they run their businesses like they're not subject to all the norms of business. They don't budget properly, do cost or quality control well, don't cater to niche markets well, don't treat their customers very well and often don't even know really what their customers will probably want.

If they would start doing some quality and cost control, treat their customers well and provide them the content whenever and wherever they want it (for a modest fee), the public's attitude toward piracy would be markedly different.

Sousa had a point

[dorque_wrench]

"Singing will no longer be a fine accomplishment; vocal exercises so important a factor in the curriculum of physical culture will be out of vogue. Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken?"

Have you heard the "quality" of "singers" we've (over-)produced in the last 10 years??? Pick an episode, any episode, of Saturday Night Live from the last 10 years. NO ONE sounds live the way they sound on recording. I know what you're thinking: Beyonce. Fine. You're right. Pick another one. Can you?

Re:Sousa had a point

[MickyTheIdiot]

Bob Dylan sounds just as crappy live as recorded!

Re:Systematic copyright indoctrination

[TheVelvetFlamebait]

Unfortunately, common knowledge is not always correct, particularly when there's some uncommon prerequisite knowledge involved (e.g. slightly more advanced economics). Sometimes, you simply have to swallow information you don't understand. For example, I don't let the fact that I don't really know how a internal combustion engine works stop me from driving to uni.

Do Away With Copyrights

[Anonymous Coward]

Frankly, copyrights and patents need to be done away with. Why should it be justified that writers, singers, computer programers, etc., do some work once, and then magically reproduce it over and over and over, without really working, and they get paid as if they did that work all over again.

For example. I have a friend who just wrote a program. He gets paid $20 a copy, per year. He has sold $5,000 copies, so he makes $100,000 a year, without really doing anything. The initial time he spent on the program was a year. If he were anyone else, he would get $100,000 for his initial work, and then if he wanted to make another $100,000 dollars, he would have to keep working just as hard, for another year.

It only makes complete sense to require singers to actually perform, in concert, or in the studio, if they want to get paid. Writers should get paid for their time actually writing, and computer programmers should only get paid for their time actually programming. Inventors should get paid for a product produced, and not be allowed to own patents for ideas.

Copyrights and patents are unfair, and cater to a small portion of society. Copyrights and patents treat certain industries as if their time is somehow more valuable than the average person.

Please note, I am an inventor and a computer programmer. Also, most patents and copyrights belong to big companies, and not the individual that came up with the idea or material, so in that sense, the idea of patents and copyrights has failed anyways.

Re:Copyright is not about innovation

[JasterBobaMereel]

DVD invented as a data storage medium by a consortium of computer companies including Sony, and extended to store movies the consortium was founded by Computer companies and the movie companies joined it later ....

Blu-Ray were invented mostly by Sony, as a data storage medium - the Movie companies (including Sony's movie division) only got involved when the standards for movie formats for these discs were being decided ....

So Sony has divisions which deal in Movies and Music, and divisions which don't ... and they work together when they need to ... but it does not mean the Copyright industries innovate ...

wow what a great quote

[circletimessquare]

that's pretty much the conceptualization of cyberspace, versus "meatspace", the real world, where if you own a car, and someone takes it, you've been deprived of a car: genuine stealing, as opposed to "stealing" digital content, which isn't stealing at all

we talk about how you can effortlessly copy a file and move it anywhere in any quantity at no difference in cost, and you would think this instantaneous sharing of digital content is some newfangled philosophical challenge brought about by the latest technological innovation. a concept that wasn't dramatic enough in societal impact before the internet to have much bearing on anyone's thinking

and here's this guy from the 200 years ago, when morse code was decades off far off science fiction, pretty much nailing the issue on the head. man those founding fathers were smart

i guess al gore has to step aside: thomas jefferson conceptualized the internet! ;-P

Re:wow what a great quote

[commodore64_love]

you would think this instantaneous sharing of digital content is some newfangled philosophical challenge brought about by the latest technological innovation..... and here's this guy from [almost 250] years ago... pretty much nailing the issue on the head. Man those founding fathers were smart

QFT (quoted for truth). The internet is just a new method of spreading ideas. Before the internet, it was radiowaves, and before radiowaves it was books, and before books it was stone tablets. The technology has changed but not the underlying foundational principle. Ideas are infinitely reproducible and can be spread to many, without depriving the original owner of his creation.

i guess al gore has to step aside: thomas jefferson conceptualized the internet! ;-P

+1 Funny.

Re:digital copy EQUALS exact copy

[jedidiah]

When the highest price you are willing to pay is ZERO, the "quality" doesn't matter.

So the "problem of perfect copies" is really a big fat red herring.

and before that: speech

[circletimessquare]

speech: the original idea sharing engine

so the internet didn't kill copyright. copyright as an enforceable, philosophically sound concept was destroyed sometime in the pleistocene ;-)

Re:Quality keeps declining

[Brian Feldman]

Can you even name a few contemporary orchestral composers? If not, I suggest that you have no ability to speak toward their relative "quality."

Re:What the geek choses to forget.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you a troll? If so, congratulations, your shtick is extraordinarily consistent and well-developed. A little tiring to read, though.