It's almost a truism in the tech world that copyright owners reflexively oppose new inventions that do (or might) disrupt existing business models. But how many techies actually know what rightsholders have said and written for the last hundred years on the subject?
The anxious rhetoric around new technology is really quite shocking in its vehemence, from claims that the player piano will destroy musical taste and the "national throat" to concerns that the VCR is like the "Boston strangler" to claims that only Hollywood's premier content could make the DTV transition a success. Most of it turned out to be absurd hyperbole, but it's interesting to see just how consistent the words and the fears remain across more than a century of innovation and a host of very different devices.
So here they are, in their own words—the copyright holders who demanded restrictions on player pianos, photocopiers, VCRs, home taping, DAT, MP3 players, Napster, the DVR, digital radio, and digital TV.
The gramophone and the player piano
In 1906, famous composer John Philip Sousa took to Appleton's Magazine to pen an essay decrying the latest piratical threat to his livelihood, to the entire body politic, and to "musical taste" itself. His concern? The player piano and the gramophone, which stripped the life from real, human, soulful live performances.
"From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful," he wrote. "And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters."
In fact, things were so bad that amateur music-making was threatened, something that could lead indirectly to the rampant sissification of the entire country. "Under such conditions," Sousa believed, "the tide of amateurism cannot but recede until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executant. 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? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?"
This sounds ridiculous, and in many ways it was. (Sousa opened the piece by admitting he might well be "reckoned an alarmist" on this topic.) But it wasn't completely crazy—recorded music did have an effect on the Victorian middle-class practice of singing songs around the piano for evening entertainment, and many Americans today don't sing regularly in groups at all unless they attend church or join a school choir.
Sousa's interest went beyond the "national throat and chest," though. What he really cared about was the rampant copying of his compositions for use of player pianos and other playback devices without any payment for the use of his work. "When I add to this that I myself and every other popular composer are victims of a serious infringement on our clear moral rights in our own work I but offer a second reason why the facts and conditions should be made clear to everyone alike in the interest of musical art and of fair play," he wrote.
His piece concluded, "Do they not realize that if the accredited composers who have come into vogue by reason of merit and labor are refused a just reward for their efforts a condition is almost sure to arise where all incentive to further creative work is lacking and compositions will no longer flow from their pens or where they will be compelled to refrain from publishing their compositions at all and control them in manuscript? What, then, of the playing and talking machines?"
Sousa was making the argument at the heart of copyright: that it promotes innovation, and that without any protection for works, many will never be created. Though player pianos didn't put an end to composition and gramophones certainly didn't put an end to music—indeed, we're lost in our own personal libraries today—Sousa's "alarmist" rhetoric about the effects of new technology continued throughout the twentieth century and into our own. Indeed, the rhetoric increased both in volume and apocalyptic fervor, even as copyright law granted ever more rights to creators.
Photocopiers
When technological innovation took off after World War II, new products like the photocopier quickly changed entire ways of doing business. By the 1970s, such devices had caught the attention of the increasingly well-organized and professional content industries, which routinely deployed lawyers or lobbyists (and often both) to address threats to their business models.
We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine.
The photocopier, invented by Xerox, became a target. In 1972, Time quoted UCLA law professor Melville Nimmer as saying, "the day may not be far off when no one need purchase books" thanks to the sinister uses of the copier. But books were hard to copy, and the process cost money. Academic journals, though, were high-priced, had low subscriber bases, and were stuffed with easily copiable articles. The copier thus represented a particular threat to these publications, several of which filed lawsuits.
One of the most famous came from Williams & Wilkins, a medical journals publisher, who went after the US government for allowing or making photocopies of articles in journals at the National Library of Medicine and the National Institutes of Health. The worry was clear: no academic would subscribe to journals anymore, but simply copy relevant articles from library copies, thereby reducing the potential market for such journals even further.
The government claimed the use was fair "since no more than one copy was made in response to each request, that the copies were made in the interest of furthering research, and that the technique was simply a mechanical improvement on the long-accepted practice of hand-copying material." The courts agreed, within certain limits (though as anyone in academia knows the issue remains contentious especially as applied to course packs).
The VCR
The copier didn't destroy academic publishing or the book business, just as the player piano and gramophone failed to destroy music. But the rhetoric around new devices just kept spiraling further out of control. In 1982, when the movie and music businesses were engaged in a full court press to shut down the hot new VCR, the warnings about its sinister effects made Sousa sound like a wimp.
Chief movie lobbyist Jack Valenti appeared at a Congressional hearing on the VCR and famously went hog-wild. "This is more than a tidal wave. It is more than an avalanche. It is here," he warned after reciting VCR import statistics. "Now, that is where the problem is. You take the high risk, which means we must go by the aftermarkets to recoup our investments. If those aftermarkets are decimated, shrunken, collapsed because of what I am going to be explaining to you in a minute, because of the fact that the VCR is stripping those things clean, those markets clean of our profit potential, you are going to have devastation in this marketplace We are going to bleed and bleed and hemorrhage, unless this Congress at least protects one industry that is able to retrieve a surplus balance of trade and whose total future depends on its protection from the savagery and the ravages of this machine."
I am one who has a belief that before the next few years the Japanese will have built into their machines an automatic situation that kills the commercial.
Blood, hemorrhage, devastation, avalanche, tidal wave, and—savagery? (Many of Valenti's comments stressed the "Japanese" nature of the VCR threat, since most devices were made there, giving his whole speech an unpleasant undertone.) But really, these comparisons were just the warmup. One lobbyist (rightly) contended that "the VCR is the greatest friend that the American film producer ever had," to which Valenti responded, "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone."
This wasn't just about film producers; even the American public was defenseless, alone, at the mercy of a throat-throttling invader who lurked outside in the night.
But Valenti's actual concern was far more pragmatic, much less sinister, and not really about the American public at all. He was worried about commercial skipping.
"86.8 percent of all these owners erase or skip commercials. I have here, Mr. Chairman, if you are not aware of how this works—this is [a] Panasonic. This is a little remote control device that you use on machines. It has on here channel, rewind, stop, fast forward, pause, fast advance, slow, up, down, and visual search, either going left or right
"Now, what does that mean, Mr. Chairman? It means that when you are playing back a recording, which you made two days ago or whenever—you are playing it back. You are sitting in your home in your easy chair and here comes the commercial and it is right in the middle of a Clint Eastwood film and you don't want to be interrupted. So, what do you do? You pop this beta scan and a one-minute commercial disappears in two seconds."
When asked if that was "all bad," Valenti responded in his typically colorful way. "If you are watching a Clint Eastwood film it is the most cheerful thing you can do. However, if you are an advertiser who has paid $280,000 a minute to advertise, he feels a very large pain in his stomach as well as in his checkbook because it destroys the reason for free television, the erasure, the blotting out, the fast forwarding, the visual searching, the variable beta scans. The technology is there and I am one who has a belief that before the next few years the Japanese will have built into their machines an automatic situation that kills the commercial."
And that, in turn, meant the total death of free over-the-air television.
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