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

by Alex Sayf Cummings

  55. “Hearings before the (Joint) Committees on Patents, June 6–9, 1906,” 31.

  56. U.S. Const. art. I, § 8, cl. 8.

  57. Henry, Copyright—Information Technology, 51.

  58. Neil Weinstock Netanel, “Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society,” Yale Law Journal 106 (1996): 294.

  59. “Arguments before the Committee on Patents, May 2, 1906,” in Brylawski and Goldman, Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act, Volume 4, 20.

  60. “Stenographic Report,” 42.

  61. Ibid., 43.

  62. Roger W. Erickson, “Copyrights—Mechanical Reproduction of Musical Compositions—Liability of Non-Manufacturing Seller of Unauthorized Recordings,” George Washington Law Review 26 (1958): 746; a comprehensive guide to the licensing system can be found in Harry Henn, The Compulsory License Provisions of the United States Copyright Law (Washington, DC: US Copyright Office, 1957).

  63. “Arguments before the Committee on Patents, May 2, 1906,” 15.

  64. Ibid., 8.

  65. Samuels, Illustrated Story of Copyright, 37.

  66. “Hearings before the Joint Committee on Patents, December 7–11, 1906,” in Brylawski and Goldman, Legislative History of the 1909 Copyright Act, Volume 4, 307.

  67. William Lichtenwanger, “94–553 and All That: Ruminations on Copyright Today, Yesterday, and Tomorrow,” Notes 2nd ser. 35 (1979): 813.

  68. Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years Volume III: From 1900 to 1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 16–9.

  69. Herbert, “Canned Music,” 8.

  70. When Senator Reed Smoot (R-UT) proposed consideration of the bill, only Senator Charles Allen Culbertson (D-TX) objected, demanding more information on the minor differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill. Despite this snag, Smoot again brought the bill to the floor later in the day, and it passed without amendment or objection. Congress, Senate, Congressional Record, 60th Cong., 2d sess. (1909), 3744–7.

  71. Ibid., 3744.

  72. “Arguments before the Committee on Patents, May 2, 1906,” 22.

  73. “Stenographic Report,” 28.

  74. Ibid., 3.

  75. Bilton, “The Talk of Ohio,” 1.

  76. Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels, 56.

  77. Roland Gelatt, The Fabulous Phonograph: 1877–1977 (New York: Macmillan, 1977), 60.

  78. Fonotipia Limited et al. v. Bradley, 171 F. 951 (U.S. App. 1909) at 953.

  79. Ibid ., at 955–6.

  80. Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels, 56.

  81. Fonotipia, 171 F. at 957.

  82. Ibid.

  83. Ibid., at 956–7.

  84. Ibid ., at 954.

  85. “Is Deception a Necessary Ingredient of Unfair Competition?” Harvard Law Review 30 (1916–1917): 168.

  86. Fonotipia, 171 F. at 957.

  87. International News Service (INS) v. Associated Press (AP), 248 U.S. 215 (1918).

  88. Ibid., at 239.

  89. Metropolitan Opera Association v. Wagner Nichols Recorder Corp., 199 Misc. 786, 101 N.Y.S. 2d 483 (Sup. Ct. 1950).

  90. INS, 248 U.S. at 240. Justice John H. Clarke did not participate in the case.

  91. David Suisman, Selling Sounds: The Commercial Revolution in American Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 114–21.

  92. Feist Publications, Inc., v. Rural Telephone Service Co., 499 U.S. 340 (1991); Sears, Roebuck & Co. v. Stiffel Co., 376 U.S. 225 (1964); Compco Corp. v. Day-Brite Lighting, Inc., 376 U.S. 234 (1964); Arthur R. Miller, “Copyright Protection for Computer Programs, Databases, and Computer-Generated Works: Is Anything New Since CONTU?” Harvard Law Review 106 (March 1993): 978–9.

  93. INS, 248 U.S. at 262–3.

  Chapter 2

  1. “Music Copyright Legislation Develops New Battle Fronts at Third of House Hearings,” Billboard, June 14, 1947, 4; “Copyright Act Overhaul Move Seen in Offing,” Billboard, January 31,1948, 34; Mildred Hall, “AFM Charges Revision Gives Short Shrift to the Musicians,” Billboard, July 10, 1965, 8; Russell Sanjek, American Popular Music and Its Business: The First Four Hundred Years Volume III: From 1900 to 1984 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 130.

  2. David Diehl, “‘Call It Bootlegging but It’s Legal’: Eli Oberstein and the Coarse Art of Indie Record Production,” ARSC Journal 31 (fall 2000): 282.

  3. Allan Sutton and Kurt Nauck, American Record Labels and Companies: An Encyclopedia (1891–1943) (Denver, CO: Mainspring Press, 2000), 214.

  4. “Petrillo Perplexed,” Time, June 28, 1943, 76.

  5. Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels, 305.

  6. Ibid., 214.

  7. Ibid., 161, 208; media scholar Jacob Smith has written extensively about the content of the “party records” or “blue discs” that attained limited popularity in the late 1930s and early 1940s. Jacob Smith, “Filling the Embarrassment of Silence: Erotic Performance on ‘Blue Discs,’” Film Quarterly 58 (2004): 26–35.

  8. “Mr. Big,” Time, February 19, 1940, 59.

  9. Sutton and Nauck, American Record Labels, 208.

  10. David Diehl, “Risque,” The Blue Pages, August 11, 2008, http://www.hensteeth.com/risque.html, accessed February 20, 2009.

  11. “New Hearing Is Set on Disk Called Nazi,” New York Times, October 27, 1959, 11; David Diehl, e-mail correspondence with author, February 20, 2009.

  12. Jeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: How the Shift from Ownership to Access Is Transforming Modern Life (London: Penguin, 2000), 24; see also Benjamin B. Hampton, History of the American Film Industry: From Its Beginnings to 1931 (New York: Dover, 1970).

  13. Charles Edward Smith, “Background to Bootlegging,” Record Changer, January 1952, 3.

  14. Wilder Hobson, “Le Jazz Jubilant,” Saturday Review, August 25, 1951, 41.

  15. David Suisman, “The Sound of Money: Music, Machines, and Markets, 1890–1925” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 2002), 208.

  16. Eric Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz: African American Musicians as Artists, Critics, and Activists (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 47.

  17. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (New York: Pantheon Books, 1993), 282–3.

  18. J. R. Taylor, “Jazz Periodicals” in H.R.S. Society Rag (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 1.

  19. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, 48.

  20. Stephen Duncombe, Notes from Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (London: Verso, 1997), 3.

  21. Stephen W. Smith, “Hot Collecting,” in Jazzmen, ed. Frederic Ramsey and Charles Edward Smith (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 292.

  22. Dick Reiber, “First Thrills in Beulah Land,” H.R.S. Society Rag 1 (July 1938): 9.

  23. Reiber, “First Thrills in Beulah Land,” 11.

  24. Smith, “Hot Collecting,” 290.

  25. Ibid., 291.

  26. Ibid.

  27. A useful comparison can be found in anthropologist Mark Jamieson’s work on collectors of doo-wop, northern soul, and other genres, for whom the prestige and originality of bootlegs were important; Jamieson, “The Place of Counterfeits in Regimes of Value: An Anthropological Approach,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 5 (1999): 1–11.

  28. Smith, “Background to Bootlegging,” 4.

  29. See “5 dub,” in Webster’s Third New International Dictionary of the English Language (London: Encyclopædia Britannica, 1966), 698.

  30. George Hoefer, “Few Discerys Cash in on Bechet’s Popularity,” Downbeat, June 16, 1948, 12.

  31. Russell, “Boogie Woogie,” in Ramsey and Smith, Jazzmen, 192.

  32. On the decline of the cylinder, see Gelatt, Fabulous Phonograph, 158–71.

  33. Hammond “was born in the kind of family and educated at the kind of school and given the kind of accomplishments, accent (slightly Hahvud) and clothes that mean the future
is assured and just cushy. He didn’t choose to be an expensive lawyer like his father, or anything else respectable and gilt-edged that his Westchester family might have wanted.” Otis Ferguson, “John Hammond,” H.R.S. Society Rag no. 2 (September 1938): 2.

  34. David L. Morton Jr., Sound Recording: The Life Story of a Technology (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University, 2006), 98.

  35. S. J. Begun, Magnetic Recording (New York: Murray Hill Books, 1949), 220.

  36. Morton, Sound Recording, 98.

  37. Ashley Kahn, liner notes in Various Artists, Billy Crystal Presents: The Milt Gabler Story (New York: Verve Records, 2004).

  38. Charles Delaunay, “Untitled,” H.R.S. Society Rag no. 5 (September 1940): 6.

  39. Smith, “Background to Bootlegging,” 4.

  40. Ibid.

  41. “H.R.S. Members—Attention!” H.R.S. Society Rag no. 1 (July 1938); Otis Ferguson, “John Hammond,” H.R.S. Society Rag no. 3 (January 1939): 1–7; Frank Norris, “Wilder Hobson,” H.R.S. Society Rag no. 3 (January 1939): 1–4.

  42. Frederic Ramsey Jr., “Grand Lama of Jazz,” H.R.S. Society Rag no. 4 (August 1940): 4.

  43. Norris, “Wilder Hobson,” 2. The unusual usage of the word “philatelist”—a stamp collector—suggests that Norris conceived of the relatively new practice of record collecting in the familiar terms of established hobbies, as if collecting jazz records were essentially similar to pressing stamps in a book.

  44. “Records—How Experts Rate Them,” H.R.S. Society Rag no. 4 (August 1940): 30–1.

  45. “Hot Society,” Time, May 17, 1937, 50.

  46. Porter, What Is This Thing Called Jazz, 51.

  47. Paul Starr, The Creation of the Media: Political Origins of Modern Communications (New York: Basic Books, 2004), 336.

  48. Herbert v. Shanley Co., 242 U.S. 591 (1917); Starr, Creation of the Media, 339.

  49. Susan J. Douglas, Listening In: Radio and the American Imagination (New York: Times Books, 1999), 85–6.

  50. Ibid., 90–2.

  51. Melville B. Nimmer, “Copyright Publication,” Columbia Law Review 56 (1956): 185–202.

  52. “Piracy on Records,” Stanford Law Review 5 (1953): 446.

  53. RCA v. Whiteman, 114 F.2d 86 (U.S. App. 1940), at 4.

  54. RCA v. Whiteman, 28 F. Supp. 787 (U.S. Dist. 1939), at 6–7.

  55. RCA, 28 F. Supp. 787, at 15.

  56. Ibid ., at 12.

  57. Ibid., at 11.

  58. Melvin Garner, “The Future of Record Piracy,” Brooklyn Law Review 38 (1971): 409–10.

  59. RCA v. Whiteman, 114 F.2d 86, at 5.

  60. Ibid ., at 6.

  61. Ibid., at 5.

  62. Ibid., at 13.

  63. Ibid., at 7–8.

  64. Learned Hand, The Spirit of Liberty: Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand (New York: Knopf, 1952), 189–90.

  65. Metropolitan Opera Association v. Wagner-Nichols Recorder Corporation, 199 Misc. 786, 101 N.Y.S.2d 483 (Sup. Ct. 1950).

  66. Ibid ., at 796.

  67. Ibid ., at 796–7.

  68. Ibid ., at 791.

  69. Ibid ., at 793.

  70. Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs, 19.

  71. Metropolitan v. Wagner-Nichols, at 797–8, 800.

  72. Ibid ., at 796.

  73. Jacobellis v. Ohio, 378 US 184 (1964).

  74. Frederic Ramsey Jr., “Contraband Jelly Roll,” Saturday Review, September 30, 1950, 64; as for the baker, Ramsey observed, “Jelly Roll, who once split a vaudeville bill with an entertainer who boasted he was Sweet Papa Cream Puff, would be happy.”

  75. Ramsey, “Contraband Jelly Roll,” 64.

  76. Thom Holmes, ed., The Routledge Guide to Music Technology (New York: Routledge, 2006), 172, 277.

  77. Wilder Hobson, “Le Jazz Jubilant,” Saturday Review, August 25, 1951, 41.

  78. “LP Jazz Reissues Squeeze Bootleg Diskers on Old Collector Items,” Variety, May 9, 1951, 42.

  79. Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll: The Fortunes of Jelly Roll Morton, New Orleans Creole and “Inventor of Jazz” (New York: Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1950), 298.

  80. Smith, “Background to Bootlegging,” 3.

  81. Shapiro, Bernstein and Co. v. Miracle Record, 91 F. Supp. 473 (N.D. Ill. 1950).

  82. Ibid ., at 474.

  83. Ibid ., at 475.

  84. RCA v. Whiteman, 114 F.2d at 89.

  85. Russell, “Boogie Woogie,” in Ramsey and Smith, Jazzmen, 194.

  86. “Chi Court Ruling on Copyright Status of Recorded Music Stuns Industry,” Variety, June 14, 1950, 57; “Music Biz Maps Midwest Action Vs. Diskleggers,” Variety, June 18, 1952, 41.

  87. “Victor Presses Bootlegs!” Record Changer, November 1951, 6. As evidence, the magazine published an RCA invoice that showed 466 copies of a Jolly Roger record composed entirely of performances originally released by Columbia.

  88. “Victor Presses Bootlegs!” front cover.

  89. Ibid ., 6.

  90. “Fox Called in on Disk-legging,” Variety, August 15, 1951, 43.

  91. “RCA Cracks Down on Disk-legging in Policy Switch,” Variety, September 26, 1951, 131.

  92. “Victor Presses Bootlegs!” 6.

  93. Cripple Clarence Lofton, Boogie Woogie and Blues (Pax, 195-?), New York Performing Arts Library, Rodgers and Hammerstein Archives (RHA-NYPAL).

  94. For example, see notes by Charles Edward Smith of Hot Record Society on Eureka Brass Band, New Orleans Parade (Pax, 195-?), and Hoefer’s notes on Jimmy Yancey, Yancey’s Mixture (Pax, 195-?), RHA-NYPAL.

  95. “Pax Productions: Complete Jazz Record Catalog,” Pax Records Research File, Institute of Jazz Studies, Rutgers University at Newark (RUN-IJS).

  96. “Art and the Dollar,” Record Changer, November 1951, 7.

  97. “Jolly Roger: Records for the Connoisseur,” RUN-IJS.

  98. For contrast with Pax records, see Jelly Roll Morton Vol. 1 (Jolly Roger, 195-?), Sound Recordings Archive, Bowling Green State University (BGSU-SRA).

  99. Metropolitan v. Wagner-Nichols.

  100. “Recorders vs. Bootleggers,” Business Week, February 9, 1952; “Platter Pilfering,” Newsweek, February 11, 1952, 71.

  101. William Livingstone, “Piracy in the Record Industry,” Stereo Review, February 1970, 62.