Well-written narrative of copyright law from the perspective of (1) recorded sound and in particular (2) how people who made copies of records shaped legal reactions thereto. A few bobbles ("Justice" Learned Hand; the description of the DMCA could have been improved), but does a great job contextualizing music copyright in larger political, social, and legal currents. Cummings provides a particularly clear explanation of why copyright in sound recordings seemed inappropriate early on, when everyone assumed that recordings would mostly be of lectures--it didn't make much sense to say that one version of a stump speech would have a separate copyright from another, or that a record company could own a copyright in a professor's lecture that would seemingly stop him (always him) from delivering the lecture to some other audience. And after the initial attempt to get federal sound recording copyright failed, attention shifted to the states. If you remember how Viacom accidentally accused some of its own YouTube channels of piracy, you may also see that prefigured in how RCA ended up pressing discs of copies of its own recordings on behalf of an outfit literally named Jolly Roger. ( )

A somewhat random bag of trivia and still gets things wrong like claiming the GPL prohibits commercial use which is up there with taste regions on the tongue as far as tired old myths go - 30 seconds on wikipedia could've prevented this. ( )

When a work is created, who owns it? In most cases, people would automatically credit the creator with ownership. The creator normally says who can reproduce the work and how. This is the domain of copyright law: just who has the right to copy a publication. This works well for a written creation, but what of a musical composition? Who owns the music, the sound? Can you own sound? These are the questions that faced the fledgling recording industry immediately after the invention of the phonograph. Alex Sayf Cumming examines the history of musical copyright law and how the recording industry coped with increased nuance in The Democracy of Sound.

Recording copyright infringement is not a new problem. The issue of musical ownership reared its head as early as 1877, when counterfeiters were secretly duplicating wax cylinders onto which the music was recorded. Opera singers of the 19th century, hoping to make a little money by repeatedly recording their arias for phonograph makers were shocked to find substandard duplications of their work on the market. Back then, though, you could easily tell the difference by simply how loud the cylinder played. Once records came into play, there was a whole new field of copyright issues.

And then Congress got involved. Interestingly, the discussions in Congress foreshadow the formation of the FRBR (Functional Requirement for Bibliographic Records) standards in that they wrangled over the difference between a work, an expression, and a manifestation of a work. Their decision to err on the side of caution when wording the new Copyright Act of 1909 led to a deeper loophole for counterfeiters and bootleggers to work with when proliferating copies of original works.

The post-WWII boom in jazz fandom and recording begat a renaissance in bootlegged works. One of the more interesting problems is when bootleggers were the only people helping to perpetuate interest in forgotten artists. Collectors would bumble through urban slums, offering to pay residents for any old recordings they might have, and then later duplicate them for other enthusiasts. Should we as a culture prosecute them for saving cultural artifacts?

After that, you get your standard discussion of 1970’s bootleggers and counterfeiters with a discussions of elicit concert recording, illegal records copiers, and rare recording session junkies. Cummings’s exploration of modern music piracy is perhaps the most tedious. Wrangling with the ownership of digital music, mashups, torrents, and downloads is frustrating in the fact that most of the lawmakers legislators working in this arena weren’t born in the digital age. While this isn’t a direct indictment of their abilities, it does speak to the question of whether the law can ever catch up to the technology.

In The Democracy of Sound, we get a interesting chronicle of court decisions and laws that helped to shape modern music copyright as well as the history of music piracy in all its forms. Thankfully, Cummings tries to stay away from in-depth discussions of case law, opting for more easy to understand overviews. This doesn’t do much, however, to make the legal cases and the congressional committees any more interesting. The history of recording methods, artists, and companies from the early 20th century was far more intriguing than the nuances of copyright law. I dutifully marched through this volume, but not with glee. If you are interested in music or legal history, go ahead and give it a try. ( )

The story of music copyright is a subset of the story of the total disregard for intellectual property rights. This is explored to the fullest in the Smuggler Nation. Music copyright has its own twisted story, but the model fits right in, and is an important aspect of the sordid history of appropriation in the USA. As America grew, smuggling, piracy and copying was not merely ignored, it was actively encouraged - right in the highest levels of government, the office of the president. The nation built it into its genes. With books, for example, there was 25% tariff to help keep imported books out, and since foreigners were also not allowed to hold US copyrights, American publishers simply bought one copy and reset it for sale in the USA.Job one - well done.

Then, the pendulum swung from that extreme to the other, as the USA became the most lawbound, locked up copyright haven in the world. This is now the land where Brownies get busted for singing Happy Birthday at a beach bonfire in California. When electronics permitted the democratization of music, the ownership of it suddenly became an issue. Even when the laws changed to finally permit such ownership rights, the police had to be taught and convinced it was even worth pursuing, because until 1971, it was normal. Major record companies accelerated the push, pleading horrific hardship at the hands of bootleggers who were able to sell a few hundred copies. With every change in their direction, the companies promised lower prices would result from tighter protection from pirates. And of course, with every increment of tighter protection for them, the record companies raised prices - and came back for more. It's the same story in patents, where the promise of uninhibited innovation has led instead to massive lawsuits, and the total inability to build upon previous innovation - a stifling of creativity.

What is most interesting is the rationale used by the copiers and the bootleggers and the pirates. They claimed music wants to be free, that it is part of our heritage, that it belongs to everybody, that everyone has the right to appreciate rare recordings of long gone artists, and of every variation that occurs in every live performance. This should all sound very familiar, because it is precisely the argument we see today in reference to information on the internet. And if Congress continues to be as subservient to giant corporations as it was and seems to be, there is little hope of the internet surviving in its current form. For that alone, this book merits a read.

I would have liked Democracy in Sound to be a little more colorful. Cummings could have interviewed some of the characters - the pirates, the publishers, the artists - that it portrays. The straight history of it all gets dry in places. But the importance of it all in the scheme of things, which is not really the subject of the book, is hugely important to the way the country works, and its future or downfall. ( )