Changes

When most of us think about music piracy we focus on Napster and Bit Torrent, but music piracy is nothing new. Alex Sayf Cummings explores the history of music piracy during the 20th Century in his book Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 2013). Alex Sayf Cummings is an assistant professor of History at Georgia State University. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History, Southern Cultures, and Salon, among other publications, and he is the co-editor of the blog Tropics of Meta. He is also the author of Top Ten Media History Booklist.

It seems to me that we might be recovering this idea of the public good when you look at recent activism against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as well as the Supreme Court’s very good decision in the Myriad Genetics case. I’m not much of an optimist, but I think the book at least shows there’s a back-and-forth, a push-and-pull. That’s the idea behind the title—there was a “democracy of sound” in the sense that democracy involves a lot of friction, a lot of sharp elbows and contention. The fact that there has been a fight at all is a source of hope.