Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century

by Alex Sayf Cummings

  43. Lars Brandle, “Interpol Pledges Aid against Global Piracy,” Billboard, November 18, 2000, 47.

  44. Denis de Freitas, “Some Recent Developments in the United Kingdom in the Field of Copyright,” International Business Lawyer 6 (1978): 508–9.

  45. Davies, Piracy of Phonograms, 17.

  46. De Freitas, “Some Recent Developments in the United Kingdom,” 510.

  47. Davies, Piracy of Phonograms, 125–7.

  48. Ibid., 126.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Steven Erlanger, “Thailand Is the Capital of Pirated Tapes,” New York Times, November 27, 1990, C15.

  51. UK Anti-Piracy Group, International Piracy, 24–5.

  52. Erlanger, “Thailand Is the Capital of Pirated Tapes,” C15.

  53. UK Anti-Piracy Group, International Piracy, 12.

  54. Ibid., 32.

  55. “Singapore Lays Down the Law,” Economist, March 2, 1985, 66.

  56. Eduardo Lachica, “U.S. Companies Curb Pirating of Some Items but by No Means All,” Wall Street Journal, March 16, 1989, A1; “Run on Tapes in Indonesia,” New York Times, May 31, 1988, D12.

  57. Lachica, “U.S. Companies Curb Pirating,” A8.

  58. Ibid., A1–A8; Fenby, Piracy and the Public, 70, 116–9.

  59. Lachica, “U.S. Companies Curb Pirating,” A1.

  60. International Intellectual Property Alliance, “IIPA Fact Sheet,” September 2007, 1.

  61. Charan Devereaux, Robert Z. Lawrence, and Michael D. Watkins, Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation, Vol. 1: Making the Rules (Washington, DC: Institute for International Economics, 2006), 73.

  62. Devereaux, Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation, 47.

  63. Autar Krishen Koul, Guide to the WTO and GATT: Economics, Law, and Politics (The Hague: Kluwer Law International, 2005), 21.

  64. Lachica, “U.S. Companies Curb Pirating,” A1.

  65. John Parry, “5 Nations Block U.S. Move to Include Services in Talks,” Washington Post, September 27, 1985, E8; Braga, “Trade-Related Intellectual Property Issues,” 384, 405.

  66. Devereaux, Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation, 37.

  67. Koul, Guide to the WTO and GATT, 28.

  68. “Whose Idea Is It Anyway?” Economist, November 12, 1988, 73; Duncan Matthews, Globalising Intellectual Property Rights: The TRIPs Agreement (New York: Routledge, 2002), 39; “‘Dunkel Draft’ Could Be Basis of New GATT Pact on Int’l Trade,” Manila Standard, January 18, 1992, 17.

  69. De Freitas, “Some Recent Developments in the United Kingdom,” 510; Devereaux, Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation, 64–5.

  70. Matthews, Globalising Intellectual Property Rights, 41.

  71. Devereaux, Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation, 71.

  72. Carlos A. Primo Braga, “Trade-Related Intellectual Property Issues: The Uruguay Round Agreement and Its Economic Implications,” in The Uruguay Round and the Developing Economies, ed. Will Martin and L. Alan Winters (Washington, DC: The World Bank, 1995), 394.

  73. Braga, “Trade-Related Intellectual Property Issues,” 386–90; Edward Samuels, The Illustrated Story of Copyright (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000), 48, 92.

  74. I. Gopalakrishnan, “Delhi Playing for Time on GATT,” India Abroad, January 24, 1992, 20.

  75. Braga, “Trade-Related Intellectual Property Issues,” 394–5.

  76. Bernard Weinraub, “Clinton Spared Blame by Hollywood Officials,” New York Times, December 16, 1993, D1.

  77. William Safire, “Hold that GATT,” New York Times, December 9, 1993, A31.

  78. Devereaux, Case Studies in US Trade Negotiation, 73.

  79. Telephone interview with George Stephanopolous, April 11, 2008.

  80. Frederik Balfour, “Underground Music,” Far Eastern Economic Review, May 6, 1993, 52.

  81. Balfour, “Underground Music,” 52.

  82. “Skull and CD,” Economist, December 23, 1995, 78.

  83. Ibid.

  84. International Intellectual Property Alliance, “2004 Special 301 Report: Pakistan,” http://www.iipa.com/rbc/2004/2004SPEC301PAKISTAN.pdf, accessed August 3, 2005.

  85. Jonas Baes, “Toward a Political Economy of the ‘Real’: Music Piracy and the Phillippine Cultural Imaginary,” March 17, 2002, http://polyglot.lss.wisc.edu/mpi/conference/Baes.htm, accessed November 5, 2004.

  86. David Gonzalez, “Pressed by Music Industry, New York Seizes Pirate Tapes,” New York Times, December 9, 1990, 46.

  87. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 165–6.

  Conclusion

  1. James Plafke, “Limewire Is Being Sued for up to $75 Trillion Dollars, Judge Thinks It’s ‘Absurd,’” Geekosystem, March 23, 2011, http://www.geekosystem.com/limewire-sued-75-trillion/, accessed May 5, 2011; Arista Records LLC v. Lime Group LLC, 784 F. Supp. 2d 313 (2011).

  2. A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (2001); MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd. 545 U.S. 913 (2005); Victor Li, “Manhattan Federal Judge Kimba Wood Calls Record Companies’ Request for $75 Trillion in Damages ‘Absurd’ in Lime Wire Copyright Case,” Law.com Corporate Counsel, March 15, 2011, http://www.law.com/jsp/cc/PubArticleCC.jsp?id=1202486102650&Manhattan_Federal_Judge_Kimba_Wood_Calls_Record_Companies_Request_for__Trillion_in_Damages_Absurd_in_Lime_Wire_Copyright_Case, accessed March 25, 2011.

  3. Capitol Records, Inc. v. Naxos of America, Inc., 830 N.E. 2d 250 (NY 2005); Brendan Scott, “Some Notes on Capitol Records, Inc. v. Naxos of America Inc.,” Groklaw, April 13, 2005, http://www.groklaw.net/articlebasic.php?story=20050412225604578, accessed November 24, 2012.

  4. Michael Smith, “Gotta Fight for Your Right to Perform: Scope of New York Common Law Copyright for Pre-1972 Recordings Post-Naxos,” Loyola of Los Angeles Entertainment Law Review 30 (2010): 590–4.

  5. Ibid., 590; “The Sound of Silence,” Economist, June 21, 2011, http://www.economist.com/blogs/babbage/2011/06/sound-recordings, accessed June 22, 2011; for the federal statute ending common law rights in 2067, see 17 USC § 301 (c).

  6. Greg Kot, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (New York: Scribner, 2009), 28.

  7. Dead Kennedys, In God We Trust, Inc. (Alternative Tentacles, 1981).

  8. Edward Samuels, The Illustrated Story of Copyright. (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2000), 92.

  9. Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984).

  10. Steven Levy, “The Noisy War over Napster,” Newsweek, July 5, 2000, 46–53; Spencer E. Ante, “Inside Napster,” Business Week, August 14, 2000, 112–20.

  11. Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18 (2000): 48–9; Andreas M. Kaplan and Michael Haenlein, “Users of the World, Unite! The Challenges and Opportunities of Social Media,” Business Horizons 53 (2010): 59–60.

  12. Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 196–204, 369–71.

  13. Lanier Saperstein, “Copyrights, Criminal Sanctions, and Economic Rents: Applying the Rent-Seeking Model to the Criminal Law Formulation Process,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 87 (1997): 1471–2.

  14. Congressional Record, 105 Cong., 2nd sess., Oct. 7, 1998, 9952.

  15. Doug Bedell, “Professor Says Disney, Other Firms Typify What’s Wrong with Copyrights,” Dallas Morning News, March 14, 2002, 3D; Jeet Heer, “Free Mickey!” Boston Globe, September 28, 2003, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/09/28/free_mickey/, accessed May 14, 2011.

  16. Joanna Demers, Steal This Music: How Intellectual Property Law Affects Musical Creativity (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2006); Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World (New York: Vintage, 2001); Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).

  17. “Be HIP at the Movies,” Intellectual Property Office of Singapore, July 27, 2004, http://www.ipos.
gov.sg/topNav/news/pre/2004/Launch+of+anti+piracy+movie+trailer.htm, accessed June 2, 2011; Motion Picture Association of America, “Piracy—It’s a Crime,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HmZm8vNHBSU, accessed June 2, 2011.

  18. International News Service v. Associated Press, 248 U.S. 215 (1918), 250.

  19. Grand Upright Music, Ltd v. Warner Bros. Records Inc., 780 F. Supp. 182 (S.D.N.Y. 1991); Campbell v. Acuff-Rose Music, 510 U.S. 569 (1994).

  20. “New Rap Song Samples ‘Billie Jean’ in Its Entirety, Adds Nothing,” Onion, September 23, 1997, http://www.theonion.com/articles/new-rap-song-samples-billie-jean-in-its-entirety-a,4389/.

  21. Lynne A. Greenberg, “The Art of Appropriation: Puppies, Piracy, and Post-Modernism,” Cardozo Arts and Entertainment Law Journal 11 (1992): 14–16; C. Jill O’Bryan, Carnal Art: Orlan’s Refacing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 78; Kenneth Goldsmith, Day (New Barrington, MA: The Figures, 2003).

  22. House Committee on the Judiciary, Prohibiting Piracy of Sound Recordings: Hearings on S. 646 and H.R. 6927, 92nd Cong., 1 sess., 1971, 28.

  23. Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity, 155–6; Taiichi Ohno, Toyota Production System (New York: Productivity Press, 1988), 4.

  24. Tim Quirk, “The Quiet Revolution,” Rhapsody: The Mix, April 22, 2010, http://blog.rhapsody.com/2010/04/the-quiet-revolution.html, accessed May 6, 2011.

  25. Chris Anderson, “The Long Tail,” Wired, October 2004, 170–7; Eben Moglen, “Freeing the Mind: Free Software and the Death of Proprietary Culture,” June 29, 2003, http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.pdf, 3, accessed July 19, 2011.

  26. Judith Stein, Running Steel, Running America: Race, Economic Policy, and the Decline of Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 277; James Boyle, Shamans, Software and Spleens: Law and the Construction of the Information Society (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 1.

  27. “The Information Revolution,” New York Times, May 23, 1965, section 11, 1; Greg Downey, “Commentary: The Place of Labor in the History of Information-Technology Revolutions,” in Uncovering Labour in Information Revolutions, 1750–2000, ed. Aad Blok and Greg Downey (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 228; Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society: The Information Age: Economy, Society, and Culture, Volume 1 (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1996), 21; Marc Uri Porat, The Information Economy: Definition and Measurement (Washington, DC: US Government Printing Office, 1977), 18.

  28. Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006), 6.

  29. Jonathan Fuerbringer, “Slow Unemployment Decline Foreseen by Job Experts,” New York Times, October 17, 1982, CNE1.

  30. House Committee on the Judiciary, Copyright/Cable Television: Hearings on H.R. 1805, Part 2, 97th Cong., 1st and 2nd sess., 1982, 1568.

  31. Information Infrastrucure Task Force, Intellectual Property and the National Information Infrastructure: The Report of the Working Group on Intellectual Property Rights (Washington, DC: Information Infrastrucure Task Force, 1995), 10.

  32. Kim Phillips-Fein has explored the sometimes uneasy alliance between the religious and corporate wings of the conservative movement in her Invisible Hands: The Businessmen’s Crusade against the New Deal (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010), 231. Barlow’s life illustrates that the conservative and countercultural visions were not totally separate; before founding the EFF, he was a committed libertarian and Republican activist, even working on Dick Cheney’s congressional campaign in the late 1970s before eventually breaking with the GOP; see Bruce P. Montgomery, Richard B. Cheney and the Rise of the Imperial Vice Presidency (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2009), 61–2; “John Perry Barlow: Biography,” European Graduate School, July 19, 2011, http://www.egs.edu/faculty/john-perry-barlow/biography/, accessed on July 19, 2011.

  33. On neoliberalism, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005) and Downey, “Commentary,” 230; for critiques of the paradigm, see Nick Gillespie, “Bush Was a Big-Government Disaster,” Reason, January 26, 2009, and Daniel Ben-Ami, “The Malthusians who Masquerade as Marxists,” Spiked, April 2011, http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/reviewofbooks_article/10464, accessed September 1, 2011.

  34. Noam Chomsky, “Rollback,” Z Magazine, January–May 1995, http://www.chomsky.info/articles/199505–.htm, accessed September 1, 2011; Heather Ann Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History,” Journal of American History 97 (2010): 709.

  35. David Garland, The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 98; Eric Schlosser, Reefer Madness: Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003), 215; Thompson, “Why Mass Incarceration Matters,” 703–4.

  36. Thomas J. Lueck, “Police Name the Officer Who Killed African Man,” New York Times, May 25, 2003; Barbara Ross, “Trial Stakes High for Widow, Cop,” New York Daily News, February 6, 2005, 10.

  37. Lawrence Lessig, Remix: Making Art and Commerce Thrive in the Hybrid Economy (London: Bloomsbury, 2008), xvii; available online at http://www.scribd.com/doc/47089238/Remix, accessed June 29, 2011.

  38. Sarah N. Lynch, “An American Pastime: Smoking Pot,” Time, July 11, 2008, http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1821697,00.html, accessed July 1, 2011.

  39. For a contemporary example, see Christopher Craig Latson, “Contemporary Pirates: An Examination of the Perspectives and Attitudes toward the Technology, Progression, and Battles That Surround Modern Day Music Piracy in Colleges and Universities” (MA thesis, University of North Texas, 2004): 26, 61–2.

  40. Keith Roe, “Music and Identity among European Youth,” in Music, Culture and Society in Europe, ed. Paul Rutten (Brussels: European Music Office, 1996), 85–97.

  41. William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3; see also Evan Eisenberg, The Recording Angel: Music, Records, and Culture from Aristotle to Zappa (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005).

  42. “Arguments before the Committee on Patents, May 2, 1906,” in Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act, Volume 4, ed. E. Fulton Brylawski and Abe Goldman (South Hackensack, NJ: Fred B. Rothman, 1976), 15.

  43. David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 59–75; Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years, Volume III (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 33.

  44. Alex Veiga, “File-sharing Case Worries Indie Artists,” USA Today, March 25, 2005, http://www.usatoday.com/tech/news/techpolicy/2005-03-25-indie-file-sharing_x.htm, accessed March 23, 2011; Jeff Leeds, “The Net Is a Boon for Indie Labels,” New York Times, December 27, 2005, E1.

  45. Sudip Bhattacharjee, Ram D. Gopal, Kaveepan Lertwachara, James R. Marsden, and Rahul Telang, “The Effect of Digital Sharing Technologies on Music Markets: A Survival Analysis of Albums on Ranking Charts,” Management Science 53 (2007): 1359–74.

  46. Ibid., 1372; see also Heather Green, “Kissing Off the Big Music Labels,” Business Week, September 6, 2004, http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/04_36/b3898114_mz063.htm, accessed March 23, 2011; and Peter Spellman, Indie Power: A Business-Building Guide for Record Labels, Music Production Houses, and Merchant Musicians (Boston: MBS Business Media, 2006).