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

Reprinted from Democracy of Sound: Music Piracy and the Remaking of American Copyright in the Twentieth Century (footnotes omitted) by Alex Sayf Cummings with permission from Oxford University Press USA. © 2013 Oxford University Press. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or printed without permission in writing from the publisher.

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Music, Machines, and Monopoly

Music lends itself to reproduction. A musician composes a song by fumbling for the right chords, and then transcribes the sequence of sounds as notes and words on paper. The written composition is of little use unless someone brings it to life. The performance is then captured as a sound recording, which can be reproduced on a massive scale and replayed again and again. Other performers cover the song made famous by the original artist, making their own copies of the underlying musical script. Later on, musicians take fragments of the recorded performance and incorporate these samples into new electronic works. When I download the song from an online file-sharing network, my computer makes a new copy of the recording in a folder for the music player iTunes, as well as a separate copy in the “shared” folder that provides access to the file for other searchers online. As a music publisher complained early in the twentieth century, “Cheap music is more easily copied than a book or any other work of literature.”

At each step, a new and different version of the original music is created, whether a performer’s recording of a composition, a cover artist’s reinterpretation of another recording, or the digital file extracted from a compact disc. The fact that one piece of music can be split into written symbols, mechanical sounds, and multiple interpretations has caused many headaches for those who have tried to figure out who owns the scripts and vibrations. Consumers, entrepreneurs, lawmakers, and musicians grappled with this conundrum, as the technological means of reproducing music grew increasingly numerous and complex over the course of the twentieth century. From the first mechanical reproductions of music in the 1870s to media as different as magnetic tape and the Internet, locating the author of a musical creation—or the owner of a musical commodity—has proven difficult.

What counts as music, and who should be able to control it? Is it the idea of a melody, the written composition, the live performance, or the inscription of a performance on vinyl, tape, or disc? Should the songwriter, performer, or record company have the exclusive right to control the production of a sound recording and benefit from selling copies of it? For much of the twentieth century, legal authorities could not answer these questions, and federal copyright law actually held that no one owned the recording itself once it was published. Under a system established by Congress in 1909, the songwriter (or the publisher who held the rights to a song) could choose to license the first mechanical use of a composition, but any subsequent renditions were beyond the copyright holder’s control. The composer would receive a flat royalty for each copy made of a recording of the song, but that was all. And, until 1972, the producers of mechanical copies of music, such as long-playing (LP) vinyl records, piano rolls, or wax cylinders, could not copyright their products.

Throughout this period, Americans weighed musicians’ and companies’ interest in controlling the products they created against the public’s interest in having uninhibited access to music. During the Progressive Era, Congress feared that the recording industry would be consumed by monopoly and favored protecting the public domain over strengthening property rights. Courts subsequently wrestled with the dilemma of how to respect the value that artists and entrepreneurs had invested in recordings, even though lawmakers had explicitly excluded any such consideration. As usual, attention to copyright surged upon the introduction of popular new forms of communication. As media such as the phonograph and radio became familiar to American society in the early twentieth century, judges and legislators had to grapple with the ways various technologies affected the rights of copyright owners. Many of the new gadgets, whether a paper piano roll or a shellac disc, involved the reproduction of sound, and mechanical reproductions provoked some of the most heated debates about the proper assignment of rights. The earliest cases sought to mark the line between the copyrightable music and the machine that conveyed it; once the Copyright Act of 1909 provided an ingenious way of drawing that line, courts faced new questions about whether or not record companies (and, in a related case, a news agency) had any right to prevent others from copying or otherwise exploiting their works.

The Machine That Talks, Sings, and Steals

One year before Edison first etched a sound pattern on tinfoil in his New Jersey lab, the playwright Griffin Hall penned a curious skit called The Bogus Talking Machine, or the Puzzled Dutchman. In this 1876 “Negro Farce,” a sly professor named Stanley fools a circus owner named Martello into giving him $5,000 to build a machine that talked. Stanley gets Pete, a black boy, to sit inside a box and talk. The boy is reluctant at first, noticing that the box says COD. “You can’t sell dis chile for any codfish,” he says. Stanley explains that he will pull one string for the boy to whistle and another for him to holler. Pete wonders why the professor’s head “is like a poor man’s pocket,” but he complies. Both Martello and his servant, the Dutchman, are terrified by the talking box, the latter so much that he cries out for “lager bier und sour krout.” Pete claims to be the devil, as if the machine were possessed by an evil spirit. “Oh! Blease, Mr. Debil, don’t dake me,” the Dutchman implores. “I vill gi you mine frow, mine beer, mine money, mine grout, and mine everytings.”

For Griffin Hall, a talking machine would be a machine that mimicked a human being, but the boy in his play merely imitated such a machine. The professor assumed that a machine that could reproduce the sound of human communication, and even interact intelligently with humans, would evoke wonder and fear in others. His talking machine was an agent of deception, a recurrent theme throughout discussions of sound reproduction.

In fact, the early history of the talking machine was full of imitators, copycats, and frauds who reproduced the recordings of others for sale on the disorderly market of the late nineteenth century. The disarray in the industry resulted in part from uncertainty about which recording format would prevail and what uses would be made of multiple new technologies. Would consumers buy a wax cylinder machine to make recordings in their homes and offices, as Thomas Edison predicted? Would they purchase records to listen to stories or music? Like the boy in the box, the sounds inscribed on early phonographs simply provided the aural content for a physical object, engraved on the surface of a wax cylinder only to be wiped away and replaced by the traces of other sounds. What the talking machine said mattered less than that it spoke and, perhaps, how well it spoke. Record manufacturers tended to emphasize the technical quality of their mechanical reproductions rather than the musical or literary performances contained in them. The bawdy stories, tinny songs, speeches, and jokes were often brazenly appropriated by competitors as the market for recorded music gradually took shape, and phonograph companies—largely consumed by patent battles involving the technology of recording itself—devoted little attention to asserting rights to the performances contained on their products. A few firms did move to protect the value of the performances they recorded and sold in the first decade of the twentieth century; Emile Berliner, for instance, sued New York’s Standard Talking Machine Company for violating his patents in 1898 and subsequently sought an injunction when several of the company’s leaders went on to copy Victor recordings through the American Talking Machine Company in 1904.

The Bogus Talking Machine is also a reminder that, in the earliest days of recording, the “talking machine” was just that—a vehicle for human speech. Edison initially conceived of his invention as a tool for capturing ordinary voices as much as singers or musicians; the original impetus for the phonograph had been his desire to record messages sent over the telephone. The early avatars for sound recording were characters associated with speech. The most iconic, the little white dog named Nipper, has defined the Victor image up to the present day. Nipper also bequeathed to the world “His Master’s Voice,” a slogan that became synonymous with Victor—even though the phrase has been completely severed from its original context. The image was based on a painting by the brother of Victor pioneer Eldridge Johnson, in which Nipper listens to a wax cylinder recording of his owner’s voice. The dog looks rapt and attentive, as if his master were standing right there. The cylinder, of course, could be recorded on and could indeed have contained a reminder made by the pet’s owner. When Victor adopted the image of the dog, the cylinder was replaced with a disc phonograph, a medium that did not allow consumers to make their own recordings. Unless the dog belonged to a recording artist like Enrico Caruso, it was unlikely to feature the actual voice of his master.

Soon after, the Ohio Talking Machine Company not only copied Victor’s phonograph patents but also used a wry variation on the company’s trademark image. The outfit at first placed a shaggy dog next to its phonograph, above the slogan “Familiar Voices.” In 1904 the company’s Talk-O-Phone brand swapped the dog for a parrot, an animal better known for talking than singing, and Ohio soon dropped the “Familiar Voices” slogan in favor of “Learning a Few New Ones.” Another pirate, Zon-O-Phone, used the slogan “On Speaking Terms,” and pictured a child leaning into a phonograph much like the attentive Nipper. Like “His Master’s Voice,” the slogan implied an interpersonal relationship with a machine that did what no other could—talk.

Americans of the turn of the century broadly associated sound recording with communication, rather than with music or entertainment alone. Promoters of cylinders and discs emphasized the accuracy of their devices in replicating human expression, and they pointed to the “original” quality of a recording as proof of its precision and truthfulness. Like the Victor player, the machines would capture the essence of a person; after all, the recording had to be excellent for Nipper to mistake it for his master. The Norcross Phonograph Company of New York did not trumpet the aesthetic quality of the performances on its recordings, but rather blared “GREAT VOLUME, PERFECT REPRODUCTION, AND FINE QUALITY OF TONE” across the top of its ads in 1897. The comedian Russell Hunting also advertised his records as “loud, clear and distinct” the year before. The ad pointed out that the “Standard Humorous Talking Records” were distributed to “all parts of the English speaking world”—a crucial fact, since many of the recordings consisted of stories about the antics of two greenhorns, Hiram and Casey. (In one episode, Casey tries to auction “a pug dog, a pair of gentleman’s pants and photograph picture of Napoleon Boneypart.”) A spoken story is much less likely than music to be appreciated among people of different tongues around the world.

Companies emphasized that their recordings were loud and clear because they were “original,” as opposed to the inferior records that unscrupulous competitors made by copying the sounds inscribed on other firms’ cylinders and discs. In 1897 John Monroe of Portland, Oregon, assured readers of The Phonoscope: A Monthly Journal Devoted to Scientific and Amusement Inventions Appertaining to Sound & Sight that his records were all “‘original,’ ‘no duplicates,’ made one at a time, every word guaranteed to be clear and distinct, and we are the only parties now making them.” Monroe specified “one at a time” because, at the time, wax cylinders could only be recorded individually; an artist would sing or speak into several engraving machines at once to make multiple “copies” of a performance, and the resulting record itself was difficult to copy. Russell Hunting, for instance, was paid a dollar per minute for his services in front of the cylinder’s horn on at least one occasion. J. W. Meyer of New York’s Globe Phonograph also announced that his records were original in 1896. “I am making my own records, and can guarantee each one first-class in every respect, loud, and each word distinct,” the singer said, “and also without that disagreeable noise found in duplicate records.”

In the hurly burly of the early record industry, virtually nothing was sacred. Copyright laws did not address how the music on cylinders and discs ought to be regulated. Congress did pass a bill in 1897 to give composers the right to control performances of their work, so that music venues, for instance, had to remunerate songwriters. The new law, though, proved difficult to enforce and only applied to live human performances—the scratchy sounds that issued from wax cylinders in homes and public phonograph parlors did not count as public performances. Thus, early entrepreneurs in sound recording were free to run riot with other people’s work, recording performances of songs without paying composers, copying recordings by other companies and artists, and even sticking the names of well-known artists on recordings by unknowns.

Numerous artists took to the press to protest that their names and likenesses were being used to sell recordings they had not made. In one poignant example, the bandleader John B. Holding complained that a company was selling recordings under the name of his outfit, the Gilmore and Holding Band, even though they only recorded for the Columbia Phonograph Company. “The authority to use the name of Gilmore and his men for phonograph record-making work was granted to me by Mr. Gilmore some time before his death,” Holding wrote in 1897. “The Band to-day is composed of the same musicians who worked so long under the direction of this famous master. Is there no redress for such a fraud?”

Holding was not the only artist decrying the unauthorized use of his identity. Hunting also highlighted the veracity of his records because “certain unprincipled individuals and corporations are duplicating my work, thereby deceiving the public by furnishing a record about one-third as loud as the original.” Hunting’s emphasis on volume strikes the contemporary reader as odd. He complained that piracy was bad, not because his competitors took advantage of the imaginative element of his story or the skill that went into performing and recording it, but because the unauthorized copy failed to be as loud as the original, damaging the reputation of the Casey records and defrauding the consumer. For Hunting, the technical quality of the device mattered more than its creative content.

Russell Hunting had reason to be concerned about unwarranted duplication. At one point, a man going by the name of Frank N. Hunting advertised and sold recordings of his monologues, implying that the two were related. Like Holding and others, Russell Hunting turned to the press to warn the public about the knockoffs. In another incident, Russell Hunting had agreed to record his popular storytelling routine, “Cohen at the Telephone,” for the Leeds and Caitlin recording company in the 1890s. He signed on to record “Cohen” ten times, at a rate of $5 for each performance. He sang into four different phonograph horns, which would inscribe his sounds on four different cylinders. However, in the middle of his fourth round, Hunting noticed that an office boy was carrying twenty-five cylinders of his performance through the studio. He suspected that Leeds and Caitlin were making additional copies of his performance without paying him, apparently by producing inferior second-generation copies from the cylinders he originally recorded. When he threatened to out the company’s misdeeds to the press, Leeds relented and paid him for the additional copies. Thus, although a first-generation recording might be a “copy” of a live performance, it was still more original than the copy of the copy, which Hunting considered to be an inferior imitation. The purported purpose of the talking machine might have been to imitate real people, but men like Russell Hunting sought to distinguish themselves from those who copied the imitators. “A poor article is never imitated,” Hunting asserted. “GOOD ONES ALWAYS ARE. Imitation is the highest flattery.”

The Push for Reform

R. R. Bowker wrote like a man who had fought many battles and nursed more than a few wounds in the process. As the journalist and editor looked back in 1912 on a life of fighting for the enlargement of copyright, Bowker noted “a recurring sense of the losses which the copyright cause has suffered during the long campaign for copyright reform.”22 He saw his mission as the unenviable one of pushing an obstinate America down the path of world progress. The nation, he felt, must catch up with European powers that had already expanded copyright laws, extending the term of protection to the life of the author plus fifty years. Although the 1909 reforms he earnestly advocated in Congress did improve the terms for rights holders, Bowker still dreamed of the day when America could “enter on even terms the family of nations and become part of the United States of the world.”

Congress had been considering a major revision of copyright law for years, but none of the pamphleteers and boosters were able to push lawmakers to action as effectively as the player piano and the phonograph did. The player piano today may seem like a quaint artifact of a remote American past, yet the piano and the paper rolls that conveyed music to its mechanical teeth forced American artists, jurists, and politicians to rethink the lines between idea, music, and machine. To a greater extent than even the phonograph, the popularity of which would soon consign the piano roll to antique stores and museums, the arguments over this medium defined the way music was recorded and sold in the United States for much of the twentieth century.

Hearings for a new copyright act had begun in 1905, but before any legislation was passed, two court cases pushed Congress toward the speedy resolution of the problems posed by sound recording. What was most pressing about these decisions was the potential conflict between them. In White-Smith v. Apollo (1908), the US Supreme Court held that the “copying” of music in piano roll form was legitimate because the roll was part of a machine and, thus, not copyrightable; whereas in Fonotipia v. Bradley (1909), the Circuit Court for the Eastern District of New York ruled that the unauthorized reproduction of phonograph records amounted to deceptive and unfair conduct. The decisions laid out separate lines of reasoning that would define the complicated legal evolution of recorded sound for years to come.

The debate over copyright and sound recording can be said to have begun on the plantation—or, at least, in some fantasy of the South that germinated in the creative subconscious of late nineteenth-century Americans. On the cover of the sheet music for Adam Geibel’s 1897 hit “Kentucky Babe,” a stereotypical cartoon of an impish African American spies out from below a banner that reads “A Plantation Lullaby.” To the right are the labels “40 cents” and “Copyright for all countries.” In the middle is a picture of a daydreaming young man, identified as “Harry Clinton Sawyer, Chanteur Excentrique.” Musical compositions had been protected under federal copyright law since 1831, and Geibel sold the rights to produce sheet music of his song to the White-Smith Music Publishing Company. Little did Geibel or White-Smith suspect that the right to present this music to the public would also be taken up by another company, Apollo, which created perforated paper rolls for automatic pianos.

White-Smith believed that a piano roll that tamped out the melody of “Kentucky Babe” was as much their property as the sheet music that represented it in treble clefs and quarter notes. If another company could sell their song as a roll without paying them a cent, White-Smith might suffer diminished sales of the original written music. What was the difference between the holes punched in paper that cause a piano to play a particular melody and the musical notation representing a song? The music publisher’s attorney, Livingston Gifford, argued that mechanical reproductions were covered under the Constitution’s protection of an author’s “writings,” which originally referred to books, maps, and charts but had been extended to include photographs and paintings. “‘Musical composition,’ the term of the statute under which this case comes,” he proposed, “is broad enough to include perforated music.”

The Apollo Company, however, insisted that copyright could not apply to a piano roll. The perforated paper was part of a machine, which was only subject to patent. “Things intended for mechanical function—for use in themselves—will not infringe copyright,” Apollo’s lawyers Charles Burton and John O’Connell told the Supreme Court, “and are not copyrightable merely because of incidentally being able to perform some part of the function of things copyrightable.” They also insisted that the judges stick to the wording of the current copyright statute, which did not address any mechanical reproductions of music. Their argument had some grounding in international law. Since the making of music boxes and musical clocks was an important industry for Switzerland, the Berne Convention of 1886 had exempted mechanical devices from copyright law. Popular composer Victor Herbert, however, told the New York Times that a music box was in no way the same as a player piano roll. “No possible harm to the composer could be foreseen,” Herbert charged, “because the reproducing device [the music box] was a permanent, unchangeable part of the instrument and the selections reproduced by the same were limited to but few short pieces.”

During the oral arguments, the courtroom was full of gadgets; music boxes, wax cylinders, and an easel draped with perforated paper were on display. On the cylinder phonograph, a metal stylus etched the pattern of vibrating sound waves; the stylus could retrace the grooves to recreate the sound, and users could shave the pattern off to record a new sound in the wax. Although the flat disc phonograph invented by Emile Berliner in 1888 lacked this re-recording capability, the hard-rubber discs produced louder sound than cylinders, which often required users to listen through rubber tubes and earplugs. Curiously, there is no evidence that disc recordings were present in the courtroom during the trial. In 1908, the cylinder was still at the height of its popularity. The plaintiffs wanted to illustrate to the judges the array of old and new recording technologies. They hoped that a demonstration of the player piano versions of “Little Cotton Dolly” and “Kentucky Babe” would persuade the judges that the sound generated was sufficiently similar to White-Smith’s original written compositions to constitute copyright infringement. “Chief Justice [Melville] Fuller, with a twinkle in his eye, inquired whether or not it was proper that Justice [John] Harlan, who is from Kentucky and is a vigorous youngster of some seventy-four years, should sit in the case,” the Washington Post reported. “None of the justices laughed louder than Justice Harlan.”

The experiment may have amused the Court, but it did not accomplish what White-Smith intended. The justices looked at the various objects before them and concluded that they were fundamentally different from the visual materials covered by copyright. Writing for a unanimous Court, Justice William Day defined a copy as “that which comes so near to the original as to give to every person seeing it the idea created by the original.” Neither the grooves on a wax cylinder nor the holes in a piano roll were intelligible to the human eye, unlike a score, a painting, a photograph, or a novel. They conveyed no meaning, in Day’s words, and thus could not receive copyright protection. Like a computer disk or video game cartridge, the piano roll contained and communicated information in a way no one could understand without the help of a machine, and the Court believed copyright was limited to expressions that were visually accessible.

Though he concurred in the decision, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. still felt uneasy with the Court’s interpretation of the statute. For him, copyright applied to any “new collocation of visible or audible points—of lines, colors, sounds, or words.” Any machine that recreated such an assemblage of sound made a copy of it, and if the current law did not permit this expansive view, then he believed Congress ought to change it. Indeed, the Washington Post reported that members of Congress followed the case closely. Copyright reform hearings then being held had commenced three years earlier, but the Patents Committee held off drafting a fresh proposal for copyright reform until the Supreme Court issued its decision. In a way, the Court threw down a gauntlet that pushed Congress to bring the reform process, frequently a long and contentious one, to a close. President Theodore Roosevelt had called for a comprehensive revision of copyright law in 1905, citing the “many articles which, under modern reproductive processes, are entitled to protection.” However, Congress failed to resolve the differences between various copyright interests, only passing the Copyright Act of 1909 after the Supreme Court handed down its provocative decision.

Legal scholars have subsequently described the White-Smith decision that music must be visually perceptible to be copyrighted as “incredible” and “truly shocking,” but the Court felt obligated to rule only on the existing statute, which made no mention of mechanical renditions of music. In fact, leading law journals at the time viewed the ruling as logical and straightforward. Perhaps recognizing the shortcomings of the existing law in regard to new technology, the Court concluded that “considerations of the hardships of those whose published productions are not protected by the copyright properly address themselves to Congress and not to the courts.” The songwriters and their business partners had been pressing their case since 1905, and the White-Smith case lent new urgency to their quest to expand the scope of musical copyright.

Copyright Reform in the Progressive Era

In 1905, Congress went where the copyright holders were. Lawmakers left Washington in March with five copyright bills unresolved, and the Senate Committee on Patents arranged a conference in New York the following May to hear from a variety of interested parties: academics, artists, song publishers, and newspapermen, each representing some part of the city’s diverse media. “It is generally admitted by those most directly concerned that the copyright laws of the United States need revision,” the Librarian of Congress, Herbert Putnam, observed in April 1905. Putnam decided to hold the meeting where those “most directly concerned” could easily offer their views on reforming copyright.

Finding receptive ears at these meetings, representatives from publishing, music, and the visual arts pressed for the idea of divisible copyrights. For example, dramatists wanted separate “show-rights” and “stage-rights” for their works. Most speakers advocated greater punitive damages for infringement and the extension of copyright for “as long a period as possible.” Preferably, copyright would be defined separately for each category of works. Brander Matthews, a Columbia University literature professor, suggested that newspapermen might need a shorter copyright than the author’s-life-plus-fifty-year term that his group, the National Academy of Arts and Letters (NAAL), sought. “The first thing to do is to let each one of the particular specific callings state what it wants,” he said. A musician, after all, might want rights that individually address printing, performance, and recording of his work. “I know that in France you cannot play a tune on a hand organ without the permission of the holder of the musical copyright,” Matthews said, while not explicitly advocating the same law in America.

Music publishers bemoaned the increase in illicit copying that accompanied the decreasing cost of printing. The development of photolithography in the nineteenth century greatly enhanced the efforts of sheet-music copiers. New technology permitted pirates to create nearly identical copies of sheet music without the sloppy mistakes that had plagued earlier imitations. At the New York conference, George W. Furniss of Music Publishers’ Association described the process:

A person with ten or fifteen dollars in his pocket can go down the street and have a popular composition photographed and put into plates and placed on the market in a very short time, and it will cost several hundred dollars to capture a few pirated copies, with no chance of getting any relief from the individuals in that line of business.

In one such case, a competitor sold hymns owned by the Oliver Ditson Company under different names, and Furniss asked Congress to allow copyright owners a greater window of time in which to investigate such pirates before they had to file suit. “It took us a long time to find them,” he added, “because we were not all churchgoers ourselves.” Even when a piece was an outright copy, the excellent quality of reproduction could keep investigators from decisively identifying the song as a knockoff.

In these early hearings, the publishers were concerned with tweaking procedural issues in the copyright law, such as the period of coverage or the time allowed to take legal action against infringers. They did not press for a fundamental change in the scope of copyright. Although the Librarian of Congress mentioned the rising use of technology, the music publishers did not dwell on the question of sound recording or mechanical reproduction. “There is a suit on now that has already cost twenty thousand dollars against the mechanical instrument men, who have taken our tools without any consideration at all,” Furniss remarked. “We believe, however, that we shall succeed in that. We believe that the present law will be sufficient to protect us.” If anything, in 1905 they were more perturbed by the ease of copying sheet music that cheaper printing technology had allowed.

The copyright forces found a less congenial atmosphere at hearings in Washington the following year. By 1906, the music industry worried about mechanical reproduction more than before. Confusion surrounded the status of sound recordings in the existing law, and few were sure of the status of written music in the new legislation. Representative Frank Currier (R-NH), chair of the House Committee on Patents, quizzed composer Victor Herbert about whether the talking machine companies enjoyed protection for the records they make. “I think they do,” Herbert averred. If one company started copying another’s records, he said, “they would go for them,” but Currier was not convinced. The two went on for several minutes, Herbert saying the piano roll and phonograph companies had legal protection and the congressman saying he was pretty sure they did not. In any event, Herbert said, sheet music was definitely not shielded from unauthorized reproduction. “Since the courts have held that the perforated roll is not an imitation of the sheet music,” he lamented, alluding to the White-Smith case, “we have absolutely no ground to stand on.”

Meanwhile, the talking machine companies seized on the conceptual muddle of copyright law to push their own interpretation of property rights. If the music publishers, who represented most composers, were going to get rights to mechanical versions of their music, then the makers of piano rolls and phonographs should receive a copyright for their unique reproductions. Horace Pettit, speaking for the Victor company, suggested that Congress insert the term “talking machines” into the list of categories of goods covered by copyright. The proposed law made no mention of mechanical reproductions as a distinct type of copyrightable expression, even though the drafters were otherwise specific in listing books, photographs, and dramatic works as eligible. According to Pettit, the phonograph recording of a specific performance by a great singer was a unique artistic work worthy of the protection of the federal government. “The particular characteristic utterances of a singer, or recitationist, or of an actor, or of an orator, or the particular instrumentation of a pianist, or leader of an orchestra,” he said, “independent of the composition itself… should be equally entitled to protection, as a photograph or reproduction of a work of art.”

The committee offered ready, if not fierce, questioning. If a scholar gives a lecture in one place and Victor records it, Rep. Robert Bonynge (R-CO) asked, would Victor then own the lecture and be able to prevent the man from giving it again, or, perhaps, making another recording of it? Pettit insisted that the copyright for the abstract content would remain separate from the distinctive material expression of it—that is, the words or ideas of the lecture, as opposed to the actual vibrations engraved on a cylinder or disc—but this notion was difficult for many to understand in 1906. The words of a story and its particular appearance as a printed novel itself could not be severed in American law, which had always protected the tangible expression of an idea and not the idea itself. Sheet music and the phonograph presented a situation in which the same germ of creativity was represented in two distinct ways.

Pettit struggled to analogize the phonograph—“a writing upon a record tablet… not to be read visually, but audibly to be read through the medium of a vibrating pencil”—to traditional “writings” like books or photographs. His challenge was to portray the phonograph as similar to the kinds of works already protected by copyright, yet sufficiently different from a written composition to merit a separate copyright. “It is a picture of the voice, as perfectly as a photograph is a picture of a man, or of a thing,” he said, “and all the personality and all the characteristics of speech of the man uttering it are there recorded.” Did he mean to suggest that the picture was exactly the same as what it represented? Was the “picture of the voice” identical to the written words and tones articulated by the voice, or a distinctive work in its own right?

In this regard, what Congressman Bonynge first thought of the content of the recording—a lecture—is key. Thomas Edison initially imagined the phonograph as an office dictation device, with domestic applications such as recording a baby’s first words or the voice of a grandparent for posterity. He did not anticipate that the medium would be dominated by the sale of prerecorded material, whether musical or literary in nature. In this still-early phase of sound recording, the devices were known as talking machines, not “singing machines,” and the notion that one performance of a lecture would be so different from another as to be exclusively used by one company did not seem self-evident. Like Pettit, Bonynge grappled for the right words: “Do you mean that if the lecturer delivers the lecture to one of the talking machines that you should take a copyright upon that disk, or whatever it is, that record, I suppose is what you call it?” What set one version of the lecture apart from the other? If the talking machine company owned the copyright for a recording of those words, how could the lecturer be free to make another record of the text for another company?

Whatever the artistic merits of the individual recording, the talking machine companies were quick to point out its financial significance. Even if a singer’s performance was not recognized as a separate work of art, the company paid him, and him specifically, a tidy sum to record it. “We might pay Mr. Herbert or Mr. Sousa or Mr. Caruso, or any of the opera singers, a thousand dollars for making a record,” Pettit said. As the bandleader and composer John Philip Sousa, who was no fan of the talking machines, noted, “They [the talking machine companies] get much more out of the human voice… They pay Caruso $3,000 to make a record in their machines, because they get the human voice. And they pay a cornet player $4 to blow one of his blasts into it.”

The public did not want just any human voice, though. They would pay good money to hear world-famous tenor Enrico Caruso sing an aria, and, with the rise of jazz, Victor might soon offer more than $4 for a particular cornet player’s “blast.” The Congressional hearings came at a time when phonograph companies began to experiment heavily with advertising, cultivating the celebrity of recording artists like never before. The images of stars like Caruso, Emma Calvé, and Pol-Henri Plançon gave the phonograph a mystique of highbrow sophistication that Victor was willing to spend large sums to create. Pettit suggested that the talking machine companies should receive copyright protection for their recordings because it took a sizable investment to create the product the public most wanted. Why should another company be able to exploit the commercial advantage that Victor had created by hiring Caruso? “It is perfectly possible, within the known arts, for that record, after we have made it, to be reproduced by a mere copperplating process by somebody else and copied,” he said, “so that we would pay the thousand dollars or so and have no protection against the party manufacturing a duplicate of it.” In other words, money talks. Even Sousa agreed on the general point when Representative William Campbell (R-OH) asked if he was seeking greater incentives to write music. “Oh, yes,” the bandleader said. “I can compose better if I get a thousand dollars than I can for six hundred.” The congressmen guffawed at Sousa’s frankness. “That is the real reason,” Campbell concluded.

The exchange did not merely reflect Sousa’s pecuniary instincts. Rather, American copyright had always centered on commercial incentives. Lawmakers traditionally premised copyright on the principle of giving just enough protection to encourage artists to bring their creative works to the market. The Constitution aimed “to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” A composer’s song did not belong to its creator forever. Rather, legislators aimed to provide a window of time in which a creator could reap sufficient benefit from the work to be motivated to create it in the first place. When the Connecticut Assembly granted the first copyright during the Revolutionary War, the protection lasted only five years. Congress did not even include music in copyright law until 1831, a limitation that reflects the law’s modest ambitions.

The congressmen who wrote the Copyright Act of 1909 continued to be skeptical of efforts to make copyright a more permanent property right, emphasizing instead the importance of preserving the public’s access to creative work. When R. R. Bowker and his allies in the professional associations pushed hard for a copyright term of the author’s life plus fifty years, Congress did not listen. As Congressman William Sulzer (D-NY) quipped, Russia provides such a term for copyright because there the artist “does not get to live very long.” Legislators decided to keep a term of twenty-eight years, after which an author could renew for another twenty-eight years. If no one expressed interest in renewal, then the work would revert to the public domain, and anyone could make use of it.

If the object of American copyright had been to give artists a reason to invest their labor in creative work, Pettit and other lobbyists focused instead on the financial incentives of big business. Sound recording raised the question of how copyright should work when the creator in question is not a solitary novelist or songwriter, but a capital-intensive corporation using costly technology and marshalling the efforts of many contributors to make a final product. The earlier hearings in 1905 had posed the question from a different angle, when lawmakers discussed the status of composite works like encyclopedias. The committee groped for a term that could describe the legitimate owner of the copyright for such a product. The term “proprietor” had been used in the law, but the Register of Copyrights, Thorvald Solberg, observed that the courts had defined a “proprietor” as an “assignee of the author,” not as a corporate author per se. One committee member noted that many scientific works were being written collectively, and another raised the example of forewords written by several professors for a series of books. “The promoter, the projector, the man who has gotten it up is Professor Gayley,” Brander Matthews of the NAAL observed, “but the person who is supplying the money is another; there is a double case—can the editor take out the copyright or is the publisher to do it?” Matthews hit closest to the target, opening the question of whether a company that manages the allocation of labor and capital, creating nothing itself, ought to be the holder of a copyright.

In 1909 as in 1905, Congress dodged the issue. Sound recording was a fresh and unfamiliar medium, and the politicians chose not to prolong an already complicated process of copyright revision, which affected so many interest groups. It appeared altogether too difficult to assign some kind of copyright to specific renditions of music represented on rolls of paper or in phonograph grooves, since the appropriate “author” was so hard to identify.

One author was already on hand—the composer—and the Copyright Act protected a composer’s right to benefit from reproductions of a musical work while allowing the talking machine companies a degree of latitude to reproduce a performance of that work. The phonograph and piano roll firms did not obtain copyright protection for their products, but they did receive a unique license (literally) to exploit the work of songwriters. The compulsory license system treated music differently from any other category of copyrighted material; it allowed companies to record and manufacture versions of the original article by paying a flat rate per copy produced. Under the system, when George Gershwin wrote “When You Want ‘Em, You Can’t Get ‘Em (When You’ve Got ‘Em, You Don’t Want ‘Em)” in 1916, he was able to choose how the song was first recorded. After the initial recording was released, though, any other company could hire Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday to record renditions of the song, as long as it paid two cents per copy to Gershwin (or his publishing company).

Congress also favored limiting copyright on the basis of property rights, however counterintuitive that notion may sound to twenty-first century ears. Copyright was not just an author’s property; it was also a kind of monopoly. For twenty-eight years, at least, the copyright holder had absolute control over how a book, photograph, or play would be reproduced. However, this power could be pernicious if it limited the way a consumer made use of property once purchased. For instance, at the 1906 hearings, music publishers had sought to bar the renting and sharing of sheet music on the grounds that the copyright owner retained the right of performance. They suggested that only the purchaser of a song received the right to perform the song, as a sort of license. If a church choir wanted to perform a cantata, it would have to buy one copy of the music for each of its singers. When Congressman John C. Chaney (R-IN) asked if the publishers’ position was that “the property itself does not carry the right to use it,” an industry representative agreed enthusiastically. However, Representative John Gill, Jr. (D-MD) insisted that the purchaser of music acquired “a property right which he can use as he pleases.” Gill compared the composer to a patentee, who can control the reproduction of his product but not its use. If a man buys a tractor, he can freely loan it to his neighbor without seeking the tractor company’s permission. In Gill’s view, limiting the way the same man could use a song he purchased would be an unwarranted invasion of his property rights.

Congress also had other more specific anxieties about monopoly on its mind. Aeolian, a piano roll company, had bankrolled White-Smith’s case against Apollo, hoping to test the judicial waters before making too great an investment in machinery, inventory, and contracts for rights to music. The manufacturer struck a deal with numerous publishers granting it exclusive permission to record the publishers’ songs if the composers prevailed in the case. The Supreme Court, of course, ruled against the copyright holders. However, if Congress allowed composers and publishers to negotiate exclusive licenses with mechanical reproducers, then Aeolian would have had a shot at cornering the industry.

The company’s scheme discomfited congressional observers, who feared “an absolute unqualified monopoly” would fall into Aeolian’s hands. The copyright reform bill evolved during the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, when politicians embraced the cause of battling trusts of all kinds; music seemed no different than oil or ice in this regard. Indeed, the notorious Keith organization was busy consolidating control over the nation’s vaudeville industry, and the talking machine business looked ripe for a takeover. Smaller piano roll firms worried that a monopoly would form, and some composers blasted the Aeolian scheme as dirty dealing by the “phonograph trust.” The compulsory license provided a clever resolution of these concerns, as it gave the composer a degree of control over his composition and a source of revenue, while also preventing a recording company from controlling how any particular song was recorded.

When Congress considered copyright reform in the Progressive Era, the balance of power still teetered between those who wanted to strengthen the rights of copyright owners and those who sought to defend free access to the arts. The new copyright reform, with its compromise between composers and recording companies, won unanimous approval from the House and Senate Committees on Patent, and the bill sailed through both chambers, winning final approval in the Senate on March 3, 1909. The legislation was the result of long, careful negotiation and had the support of Republicans and Democrats. Shortly before passage, Senator Albert Kittredge (R-SD) assured his colleagues, “This subject has been before the Patent Committee for four or five years, and the committee has expended a great amount of time and has worked hard in order to secure an agreement.”

If anything, the political leaders of 1909 chose to err on the side of caution. When the committee proposed letting churches and schools perform copyrighted music without seeking permission, the publishers’ lawyer, A. R. Serven, commented that “enforced charity, whether by statute or by violence, is vicious and ought never to be resorted to.” The committee chairman retorted, “[Copyright] is, by the way, direct charity, because… your rights are purely statutory.” In other words, copyright was a privilege granted by the government, not a moral right possessed by creators. Many of the testifiers disagreed, viewing the creative artist or rights owner as the greatest priority for the law. As the painter John LaFarge told Congress, “The originator of a thing should not be put to proving his case against the outside world, but the outside world should prove their case against him.” At the very outset of the revision, Librarian of Congress Herbert Putnam observed, “The district attorney has remarked that our statutory laws ought to be in two parts, the first, of laws to be followed, and the second of ‘moral yearnings.’ In our proposals for copyright we had, I think, better leave the moral yearnings to a later generation or at least a later session of Congress.” The quip came true. Later generations and later Congresses would expand the scope of copyright to suit greater moral aims, but, in the meantime, the “copyright forces” got less than they asked for.

Pirate Arias, Bootleg News, and Other Problems from Europe

While the ink was fresh on the new copyright act, the Eastern District Court of New York handed down one of the first decisions on a clear case of piracy. The case involved a colorful and mysterious character who arguably pioneered piracy and the legal hijinks associated with it: Wynant Van Zant Pearce Bradley. This entrepreneur, whose name soon became familiar to court observers, started out pirating records for Zon-O-Phone. In 1902, he trademarked the terms “Talk-OPhone” and “Monogram,” and ventured out from his native Brooklyn to enlist investor Albert Irish’s help in starting the Ohio Talking Machine Company. Ohio brought out a line of phonographs that closely imitated the Victor company’s machines. The various models bore the names of (Victor) Herbert, ( John Phillip) Sousa and other noted composers, apparently without permission. Even the logo for “Monogram” discs used bold-faced letters for “gram,” likely hoping to link itself to Victor’s “gramophone” in the consumer’s minds. Victor soon filed suit against the company for patent infringement; Albert Irish went bankrupt; and Bradley took to inveighing against the “Victor interests” in the pages of Talking Machine World. By the time Victor won the patent case, Bradley was in hot water again for a disc-pirating operation, Continental Records. The Italian label Fonotipia Records sued Bradley for copying arias that it had licensed Columbia Records to produce and sell in the United States. Columbia and Victor joined the suit as plaintiffs, alleging that Bradley also imitated their products, and the Circuit Court of the Eastern District of New York heard the case in 1909.

Continental was a wisp of an organization. Bradley claimed only to be its salesman, but the court could not dig up any other name in connection with the company. Continental stated its base as New Baltimore, New York, though no office or plant could be found there. When Columbia’s agents purchased some records from Continental, the receipt showed the address of a storage company. Music historians Allan Sutton and Kurt Nauck believe Continental made new masters from commercially available discs, shipped the new molds to “an undisclosed foreign location,” and then exported them back into the United States. That the court could find no office or plant for the company suggests that this export-import scheme may have been true. However, Bradley could just as easily have pressed the records at a secret factory or shop in the United States. He might have told the court that the goods were imported in the hope that the product’s ostensibly “foreign” status would deflect copyright concerns. The arias Continental copied were originally recorded in Italy, and a consumer might expect them to be foreign in any case.

Justice Thomas Chatfield observed that Columbia’s “originals” themselves were copies, in a sense. Using the disc method pioneered by Emile Berliner in 1888, the sound waves of a performance were etched onto a flat disc called the “master” record. From this first matrix, Chatfield observed, “numberless reproductions, substantially duplicates even in minute details of the original record” were made. Earlier wax cylinder recording required the singer to perform a song over and over again; the cylinders were engraved in small batches, with recorders arrayed around the performer to capture the sounds simultaneously. True mass production was not possible until Berliner invented a master disc from which any number of other discs could be pressed. In a sense, the cylinder recordings were more “original” than the discs sold by Columbia, because the latter were copied en masse from the initial master record. Nonetheless, the court distinguished between Columbia’s “duplicate originals,” which were mass-produced from an original recording of the performance, and Bradley’s copies. “The defendant’s records are not duplicates,” the judge reasoned, “even in the sense that they are removed from the original singing by but one reproduction from a matrix… The Continental Record Company makes its records from commercial discs of the complainants and must produce a second matrix before the copies can be pressed or stamped.” The pirated records were a further step removed from the real thing.

Justice Chatfield noted that Bradley had not exactly imitated the distinctive red label of Victor’s records, which the company used to distinguish its high-end line of classical music. In fact, the Bradley records did not look much like the originals from which they were copied, meaning that the pirate could not be accused of “palming off ” his copies as if they were the originals. Continental’s advertising made it clear that the records were duplicates, containing the same sounds but not identical to the originals as material objects. The judge noted, though, that Continental’s claim of equal sound quality was “a question of fact…in which the public is interested.” If consumers believed that Continental records were just as good as Victor records, and then discovered that Continental played poorly, they might be reluctant to buy either one in the future. The court found that Continental made its records of less durable material, which was prone to “scratching and irritating sounds.”

In a sense, Bradley’s knockoffs resembled the cheap generic versions of contemporary name-brand products, such as cereals or toaster pastries. In the Fonotipia case, however, the court ruled that generic editions of musical recordings could not be sold alongside the original, name-brand product. The performer’s right to his or her creative work did not figure much in the decision—as the judge noted, the musicians had worked under contract for Fonotipia and were not involved in the lawsuit. Instead, Bradley was faulted for his false claim of equal sound quality and for taking advantage of Victor’s reputation.

Both the talking machine ads and Bradley’s legal strategy suggest that distinctions between original and copied records had been commonplace in the market until the Fonotipia decision. Russell Hunting and other early recording artists were well aware that unauthorized copies of their recordings circulated on the market. Listeners did not necessarily identify one recorded performance as the exclusive product of one record company, and Bradley sought to exploit this uncertainty for all it was worth. The Supreme Court’s White-Smith decision held that anyone could produce piano rolls of songs, since this use was merely a mechanical application and not a copyrightable expression in itself, but just a year later the Fonotipia ruling declared that disc recordings could be regulated by law, through principles of fairness, consumer protection, and the public interest. “The reproduction of songs by famous singers and artists is both educational and beneficial to the people as a whole,” Chatfield wrote, “and the court cannot but take notice of the fact that music has an educational side, and appeals to substantially everyone, even though they be unconscious of the result.” The judge associated a recording with the performer, whom record companies paid to record and cultivated as popular sensations. If the court had ruled otherwise, men like Bradley could have undermined the link between a star performer and the company that had contracted his services, and recorded sound might have served as fodder for any company to exploit.

It is important to note that Fonotipia did not create a new property right. The phonograph recordings were not eligible for copyright, as White-Smith made clear, and the new Copyright Act itself did nothing to change their legal status. As the Harvard Law Review observed, the case involved “nothing more than the reproduction of an unpatented and uncopyrighted article.” The district court’s ruling against Bradley centered on the notion of unfair competition, holding that he had not violated copyright but, rather, had exploited his competitor’s investment in the recordings. The court observed that the Victor Company had built an expensive plant in Camden, New Jersey, and spent a great deal of money on advertising its product. “It may be argued that the imitation would go out of the market and be removed from interference with the original if the product proved unsatisfactory,” Justice Thomas Chatfield said in the ruling, “but it would seem that business reputation and excellence of product are entitled to some protection from imitations which discourage further use.” If nothing else, the capital investment in both production and promotion should be immune to unauthorized use. The company’s reputation was a possession of sorts; advertising could create a value in the good that the court was bound to protect.

Fonotipia covered ground that was revisited in 1918 by a better-known ruling, International News Service v. Associated Press, which recognized a quasi-property right in “hot news.” The International News Service (INS) had paid employees of the Associated Press (AP) to reveal the latest information telegraphed from the war in Europe, which was then published in INS’s newspapers at the same time as AP’s. The Court condemned INS for “taking material that has been acquired by complainant as the result of organization and the expenditure of labor, skill, and money, and which is salable by complainant for money, and that defendant in appropriating it and selling it as its own is endeavoring to reap where it has not sown.” The fact that Archduke Franz Ferdinand had been shot, triggering the outbreak of World War I, was not in itself AP property, but its significance to the public was owned by the organization that did what it took to collect the information. Its newsworthiness was value that the company created, capital transmuted into history.

Copyright law had always protected the specific expression of an idea, but never facts. As a later court observed, “The case presented particular difficulty because of the great public interest in the freest dissemination of the news.” However, in INS the Supreme Court found that news organizations could enjoy a limited right to own information itself, turning to a similar argument of unfairness that underlay the Fonotipia ruling. Limiting the circulation of important news might be bad for the public, the judge reasoned, but not having the news at all because the AP’s profit motive was diminished was worse. “Stripped of all disguises, the process amounts to an unauthorized interference with the normal operation of complainant’s legitimate business precisely at the point where the profit is to be reaped,” wrote Justice Mahlon Pitney for the five-to-three majority.

The “hot news” doctrine offered a limited right that, in some ways, resembles the compulsory license. The music publishing system created by the 1909 Copyright Act empowers the composer of a piece of music to authorize the first recording of the composition; afterwards, anyone is free to record his own version, paying a flat royalty for each copy that is produced. The INS decision allowed news organizations to take advantage of their reportage before anyone else did, much as composers could choose when and if their music would be recorded. Whoever went to the trouble of obtaining the scoop was entitled to benefit from circulating the information for some amount of time, at least so long as the news is “hot.” Both the compulsory license and the INS ruling respect the right of an individual (or, more likely, a firm) to benefit from investing labor and capital into the production of an intangible good, which is then presented as a material thing, like a piano roll or a newspaper.

Corporations had secured ground for their ownership of news and sound recordings, or at least for some of their qualities. At a time when companies were building large, complex organizations to report wartime news or to manufacture and distribute recordings around the world, these decisions opened a path for businesses to own information outside of copyright law. More important, these decisions meant corporations could own something more abstract: the “hotness” of news, or the bankability of a star performer. Struggles over sound recording and copyright broke out at precisely the moment when nascent media giants like Victor were staking out territory in the public sphere through advertising. Victor, in particular, became known as one of the most aggressive pioneers in the use of modern advertising. The reputation of its highbrow Red Seal line of records or its stable of opera stars was expensive to create yet cheap for others to exploit, just like the value of news gathered by the AP in Europe. The legal successes of these companies anticipated later high-stakes conflicts between those who made everything from records and phonebooks to lampshades and video games, and others who would copy them.

Such steps remained tentative in the early twentieth century, though. Copyright was still constrained by doubts about monopoly and the uncertainty that surrounded evolving technological and cultural forms. Decisions like INS reflected a Progressive Era predilection for limiting the control of information. In his dissent, Justice Louis Brandeis voiced these concerns. “The creation or recognition by courts of a new private right may work serious injury to the general public,” he wrote, “unless the boundaries of the right are definitely established and wisely guarded.”

The coming decades would provide numerous opportunities for songwriters, musicians, entrepreneurs, and listeners to argue about how best to bound and guard those rights. How much should a company’s investment be protected? How far could courts extend the ownership of expression before straying into Congress’s territory? Although the Fonotipia ruling condemned copiers who put out an inferior product, shady dealers continued to furnish secondhand records in the shadows. The rise of a collecting culture among music fans led to the copying and exchange of records that were out-of-print or otherwise unavailable, and the emergence of radio as a medium threatened the revenue of music publishers and record companies even as it furnished the public with a new source of “free” sound.