Second , we were but a hair’s breadth from still regarding the record labels as service bureaus for musicians, had ILO not failed, instead of the chokehold on musicians that they have been for the past decades. This would have been the case if it had not been for two intervening fascist governments — fascist in the literal sense of the word — supporting the record industry in corporatizing society and becoming the copyright industry.
Throughout the 20th century, people involved with the copyright monopoly as middlemen rather than artists fought tooth and nail against every new development of technology and culture alike. The current claims against people sharing on the net should be seen in the light of this history.
Earlier, we looked at how the record industry middlemen did a successful regulatory capture in putting themselves in the middle of the economy. As we learn from history, this has been the norm with the middlemen's behavior rather than the exception, but the last century has really seen this accelerate.
It started around 1905, when the self-playing piano was becoming popular. Sellers of note sheet music proclaimed that this would be the end of artistry if they couldn't make a living off of being middlemen between composers and the public, so they called for a ban on the player piano.
In the 1920s, as broadcast radio started appearing, another copyright industry was demanding its ban because it cut into profits. This time, it was the business of pay telephone numbers that played music over the phone. "If people can listen to music for free with this radio thing, artists will starve!" This argument was re-used through most of the century, with the word "radio" replaced by the most recent technology.
In the 1930s, silent movies were phased out by movies with audio tracks. Every theater had previously employed an orchestra that played music to accompany the silent movies, and now, these were out of a job. It is quite conceivable that this is the single worst technical development for professional performers. Their unions demanded guaranteed jobs for these performers in varying propositions.
In the 1960s, the copyright industry was fretting over people taping music off of radio, and tried to have the practice banned. The debate died off about the same time it was pointed out that this ban was technically impossible with anything less than installing cameras in people's living rooms.
The 1970s saw the advent of the cassette tape, which is when the copyright industry really went all-out in proclaiming their entitlement. Ads saying "Home taping is killing music!" were everywhere. One band responded by subtly changing the message by changing "music" to "music industry," and "We left this side [of their tape] blank, so you can help." It saw many other parodies, too; regardless, the copyright industry were acting very seriously on the message.
The 1970s also saw another significant shift, where DJs started taking the place of live dance music. Musicians' unions and the copyright industry went ballistic over this, and suggested a "disco fee" that would be charged at locations playing disco (recorded) music, to be collected by private organizations under governmental mandate and redistributed to live bands. This produces heartly laughter today, but that laughter stops sharp with the realization that the disco fee was actually introduced, and still exists.
The 1980s is a special chapter with the advent of video recording. The copyright industry's famous quote when testifying before the US Congress — where the film lobby's highest representative said that " The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone " — is the stuff of legend today. Still, it bears reminding that the Betamax Case went all the way to the Supreme Court, and that the VCR was as near as could be to being killed by the copyright industry: The Betamax team won the case by 5-4 in votes at the United States Supreme Court.
Also in the late 1980s, we saw the complete flop of the Digital Audio Tape (DAT). A lot of this can be ascribed to the fact that the copyright industry had been allowed to put its politics into the design: The cassette, although technically superior to the analog Compact Cassette, was so deliberately unusable for copying music that people rejected it flat outright. This is an example of a technology that the copyright industry succeeded in killing, even though I doubt it was intentionaclass="underline" They just got their wishes as to how it should work to not disrupt the status quo.
In 1994, the Fraunhofer Institute published a prototype implementation of its digital coding technique that would revolutionize digital audio. It allowed CD-quality audio to take one-tenth of the disk space, which was very valuable in this time, when a typical hard drive would be just a couple of gigabytes. Technically known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, it was quickly shortened to "MP3" in everyday speak. The copyright industry screamed again, calling it a technology that only can be used for criminal activity. The first successful MP3 player, the Diamond Rio, saw the light in 1998. It had 32 megabytes of memory. Despite good sales, the copyright industry sued its maker, Diamond Multimedia, into oblivion: While the lawsuit was eventually struck down, the company did not recover from the burden of defending. The monopoly middlemen tried aggressively to have MP3 players banned, just like every previous piece of new technology.
The century ended with the copyright middlemen pushing through a new law in the United States called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For the first time, the copyright industry managed to introduce intermediary liability — as in making people liable in a court of law for merely carrying a signal which is broadcast by somebody else. Just like if you put up a public wall, and would become responsible for posters that other people put up on it: Not sane anywhere, but this isn't about sanity, it is about regulatory captures and enshrining the continued profit of monopolists into books of law.
The century also ended on a positive note, as Napster hit the light of day in 1999. Deservingly, the middlemen's handling of Napster is described as as a textbook example of an industry business failure in a delusion of entitlement. In the final section, we'll take a look at how all the monopoly industries joined together to hold the entire economy for ransom.
Toyota struck at the heart of the American soul in the 1970s, and all her politicians started carrying mental “The End Is Nigh” signs. The most American things of all — cars! The American Cars! — weren’t good enough for the American people. They all bought Toyota instead. This was an apocalypse-grade sign that United States was approaching its end as an industrial nation, unable to compete with Asia.
The period of 1960 to 2010 is marked by two things: one, the record-label-driven creepage of the copyright monopoly into the noncommercial, private domain where it was always a commercial-only monopoly before (“home taping is illegal” and such nonsense) and the monopoly therefore threatening fundamental human rights, and two, the corporate political expansion of the copyright monopoly and other monopolies.
When it was clear to politicians that the United States would no longer be able to maintain its economic dominance by producing anything industrially valuable or viable, many committees were formed and tasked with coming up with the answer to one crucial question: How can the US maintain its global dominance if (or when) it is not producing anything competitively valuable?
The response came from an unexpected direction: Pfizer.
The president of Pfizer, Edmund Pratt, had a furious op-ed piece in a New York Times on July 9, 1982 titled “Stealing from the Mind.” It fumed about how third world countries were stealing from them. (By this, he referred to making medicine from their own raw materials with their own factories using their own knowledge in their own time for their own people, who were frequently dying from horrible but curable third-world conditions.) Major policymakers saw a glimpse of an answer in Pfizer’s and Pratt’s thinking, and turned to Pratt’s involvement in another committee directly under the President. This committee was the magic ACTN: Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations.