Arts Technica
By Nate Anderson
Oct 11, 2009

For the last hundred years, rightsholders have fretted about everything from the player piano to the VCR to digital TV to Napster. Here are those objections, in Big Content's own words.

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."


For the last hundred years, rightsholders have fretted about everything from the player piano to the VCR to digital TV to Napster. Here are those objections, in Big Content's own words.

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.
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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.

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