Changes

by Clinton Sandvick

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’s a bit of a funny story—at least to the extent that a story about a dissertation can be funny. I had gone to grad school with the intention of doing urban history, writing about the landscape, built environment, etc. My goal was to work with Elizabeth Blackmar, who has done a lot of incredible work about space, housing, property rights and so forth. However, in my second year I took a course in the School of Art at Columbia called “Open Source Culture,” and it got me thinking about the issues of copyright and technology that had been causing so much controversy at the time, particularly in terms of file-sharing. So I sort of made a switch from focusing on property in the physical sense of land and buildings to intellectual property.

The question that I found so urgent at the time was: if we are, as is so often said, in an information economy or a knowledge economy, then what happens to that form of capitalism when anyone can copy anything, at any time? This is going to become even more of an issue as 3D printing rapidly evolves—we’ll be copying not just music and books, but sofas and hedge-trimmers before long.

'''The ingenuity of music pirates and bootleggers is astounding. You describe how people in the Communist world used x-ray plates to make records. What do you think drives people to copy and share music? Did music companies make a mistake in trying to suppress this urge through legal action throughout the second half of the 20th century?'''

That is a tough question. It’s not surprising that record labels, music publishers and the like wanted to suppress copying. No business wants to cede part of its market—or at least part of consumer demand—to anyone else, and most institutions tend to prefer the status quo. I think copyright interests often had a short-sighted view of how music could work as a business. Some artists and labels saw radio as a mortal threat in the 1930s and didn’t want their records played on the air, which seems funny in retrospect since 20 years later the labels would be plying DJs with bribes and blow to get their records on the air. Radio airplay turned out to be a great thing for selling records.