The Piracy Crusade: How The Music Industry's War On Sharing Destroys Markets and Erodes Civil Liberties

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The Piracy Crusade
A volume in the series
Science/Technology/Culture
Edited by
Carolyn de la Pea
Siva Vaidhyanathan
The Piracy
Crusade
How the Music Industrys
War on Sharing Destroys Markets
and Erodes Civil Liberties
Aram Sinnreich
University of Massachusetts Press

AMHERST AND BOSTON
Copyright 2013 by Aram Sinnreich

License: This entire work (with the exception of photographic illustrations
by third parties) is released under the terms of a Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license
(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/us/). Some Rights Reserved.
Printed in the United States of America

ISBN 978-1-62534-62534-052-8 (paper); 051-1 (hardcover)
Designed by Dennis Anderson
Set in Dante by House of Equations, Inc.
Printed and bound by IBT/Hamilton, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sinnreich, Aram, author.
The piracy crusade : how the music industrys war on sharing destroys markets
and erodes civil liberties / Aram Sinnreich.
pages cm. (Science/technology/culture)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62534-052-8 (pbk. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-62534-051-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)
1. CopyrightMusic. 2. Piracy (Copyright)Prevention.
3. Music tradeLaw and legislation. 4. Music and the Internet.
5. Sound recordingsPirated editions. 6. Civil rights. I. Title.
K1450.S56 2013
346.0482dc23
2013040189
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This one goes out to Dunia.
The world of grownups is so corrupt!

Can it be, can it be, can it be stopped?
Ari Up
The most important thing is to realize

that you can accomplish something.
Aaron Swartz
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
xi
Introduction: Piracy Crusades Old and New
Part I: Lock and Key: Music as a Scarce Resource
15
Stacking the Deck: The Monopolization of Music
17
Riding the Tiger: Why the Music Industry Loves

(and Hates) Technology
37
3 Weve Been Talking about This for Years: The Music

Industrys Five Stages of Grief
56
Part II: Who Really Killed the Music Industry?
69
Dissecting the Bogeyman: How Bad Is P2P, Anyway?
71
Bubbles and Storms: The Story behind the Numbers
94
Is the Music Industry Its Own Worst Enemy?
119
Part III: Collateral Damage: The Hidden Costs of the

Piracy Crusade
135
7 This Sounds Way Too Good: No Good Idea

Goes Unpunished
137
8
9
Guilty until Proven Innocent: Anti-piracy and

Civil Liberties
160
Is Democracy Piracy?
179
Notes
201
Index
235
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
LIKE ALL creative work, this book resulted from the contributions
of a great many people and institutions. Although the genesis of my research on digital music and piracy dates back to my work at Jupiter
Research at the turn of the century, my interest was rekindled when I
served as an expert witness for the defense in Arista Records v. Lime Group
in 201011. Several attorneys for the defendants, including John Oller,
Joseph Baio, Tariq Mundiya, Todd Cosenza, and Chris Miritello, served
as sounding boards for my expert report in the case, which is a distant
ancestor to the book you are now reading.
As I wrote the book manuscript itself, I received copious help from
several sources. I thank Kathleen Fitzpatrick and her colleagues at
MediaCommons Press for graciously allowing me to post my draft chapters for open review on their website. Seeing each section in print as
soon as I had completed it, and knowing it was instantly available to the
public sphere, gave me the fortitude to continue working on a project
that would have been far more difficult to finish had I been consigned to
the book authors standard vacuum. I am also thankful to my colleagues
at Rutgers Universitys School of Communication and Information, and
especially those within the Department of Journalism and Media Studies,
for consistently supporting my work and affording me the resources to
complete it.
A great many people read and commented on my draft manuscript,
via both personal interactions and the MediaCommons website. The
feedback was overwhelmingly positive and constructive, but I appreciated every comment, even those that were neither. Although some
commenters have opted to stay anonymous, I can explicitly thank Jesse
Lifshitz, Samantha Kretmar, Frank Bridges, Vicki Simon, Peter Axelrad,
Billy Pidgeon, Richard M. Stallman, Mark Mulligan, John McCartney,
Cory Doctorow, Vivien Goldman, Norman Savage, Marissa Gluck,
Nicole Lewis, Eric Steuer, Ray Beckerman, Fred von Lohmann, Lucas
Gonze, Joost Smiers, Bryce Renninger, Judah Phillips, Josh Chasin,
Evan Korth, Joly MacFie, Tom Hughes, Mark Oltarsh, David Ritz,
xi
Michael Carrier, Mark Latonero, Kathryn Tasker, Parker Higgins, Karl

Fogel, Alissa Quart, Peter Maass, Mike Brown, Camille Reyes, Daniel
Timianko, Ben Kallos, Robert Schultz, Todd Nocera, danah boyd, Jesse
Gilbert, Larry Gross, Barbara Reed, Susan Keith, Nancy Zager, Masha
Zager, Jonathan Sinnreich, and the late Tom Barger for their feedback
and encouragement.
I also owe a great debt to those more instrumentally involved in the
development of this book, including all of my interviewees and primary
sources, my extremely thorough and supportive no-longer-anonymous
peer reviewers, Nancy Baym and Patricia Aufderheide, my patient and
overtasked friend Nathan Graham, who whipped the manuscript into
submission shape, the brilliant Josh Neufeld, who graciously agreed to
create cover art on a tight budget and an open license, and the folks
at University of Massachusetts Press, specifically my series editors, Siva
Vaidhyanathan and Carolyn de la Pea, as well as Bruce Wilcox and
Clark Dougan, who have been willing to go out on more than a few
limbs on my behalf.
Finally, I thank four generations of my family for continuing love and
support, especially my wife, muse, and bandleader Dunia Best Sinnreich,
without whose unwavering faith and patience I could never have written
a word of this book.
Each of you is reflected in these pages. I hope you like what you see.
xii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction
Piracy Crusades Old and New
The fight by creative industries against digital piracy is an economic necessity,
not a moral crusade.
International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), Digital Music Report 2011
A business model built on infringement is not only morally wrong but

legally wrong.
Hilary Rosen, CEO, Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), 2001.
Im on a little crusade, and I do have personal interaction with these

students. . . . I think these young kids are going to understand that it is not only
morally wrong, theyre stealing.
Jack Valenti, president and CEO, Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA), 2003
We remain the national leader in the crusade against illegal copying and
distribution of software and content online. . . . In 2010, we intend to be even
more vigilant in our pursuit of software and content piracy.
Software & Information Industry Association, Anti-Piracy Year-In-Review 2009
IN 1390, an army of crusaders set out to wage war on piracy, with

disastrous consequences for the soldiers themselves, their nations, and
the entire Western world.
The story begins in Genoa, a coastal city located at the western hip
of Italys boot, which was emerging as one of Europes wealthiest and
most influential seats of power. Like its chief competitor, Venice (located
at the boots eastern hip), the city had developed its wealth by dominating the trade of commodities with the Syrian and Egyptian infidels
across the Mediterranean sea, despite a prohibition against such commerce handed down by the Pope.
Genoa had one problem that Venice lacked: in order to gain access
to the eastern end of the Mediterranean, its sailors had to pass through
1
the Strait of Sicily, a relatively narrow aperture separating Europe from

the jutting shores of North Africa. For centuries, Tunisian privateers had
policed these waters, and for centuries Genoese ships had done battle
with them, raiding one another in countless skirmishes and a few fullscale assaults. Yet the Tunisian pirates were becoming bolder, thanks to
the encouragement of the reigning sultan, Ahmad II ibn-Muhammad,
who had begun to shift his European political allegiances from Italy to
Catalonia.1
Back in Italy, the canny prince Antoniotto Adorno, doge of Genoa,
was having problems of his own. He was facing fierce political opposition for what was supposed to be a lifelong elected position, and would
soon be forced out of office (for the second time). So Adorno developed
a plan that he hoped would solve his domestic, Venetian, and Tunisian
problems in one fell swoop: he would launch a secular enterprise to
suppress the pirates in the form of an assault on their stronghold in the
Tunisian city of Mahdia, and dress it in the aura of a crusade.2 With any
luck, this would simultaneously boost the business sector and provide
him with a heroic platform to prove his worth to the city.
The only hitch in Adornos plan is that Genoa didnt have the military
strength to launch such a siege. Fortunately, someone else did; France,
which had recently called a truce in what would come to be known as
the Hundred Years War with England, was chock full of knights who
had nothing to do, and would be glad to join in the warfare. The
plan appealed to Frances young King Charles VI, who was facing his
own challenges at home and could use a ready-made adventure with
no need of . . . serious political maneuvering to bolster his political and
religious credentials.3
On July 1, an armada set forth from Genoa bound for Mahdia. The
Mahdians, who had received advance word of the attack, secured the
sturdy walls of their city and stocked it full of provisions, determined to
wait out the European invaders rather than attempting to repel them
with military force. Shortly after the crusaders arrived, the Tunisians
sent out emissaries to negotiate. They asked the French what their purpose was in joining the assault, given that they had troubled only the
Genoese, which was natural among neighbors, for it had been customary to seize mutually all we can from each other. The French replied
that they had joined the crusade as a matter of religious duty, for the
Mahdians were Muslim unbelievers . . . which made them enemies, and
also to retaliate upon their forefathers for having crucified and put to
death the son of God called Jesus Christ. At this, the Mahdians simply
2
I NTRODUCTION
laughed, reminded the French that the Jews were more apt scapegoats,
and returned to their walled city, where they prepared for the onslaught.4
The Genoans had promised the French a swift and easy victory, but
the assault took months. During this time, not only did Europeans and
Africans alike die in various skirmishes, but the crusaders suffered and
perished from thirst, hunger, fevers, parasitic infections, and swarms of
insects. Additionally, their attempts to take the city were stymied by
the fact that they had failed to bring any battering rams, and what siege
equipment they did have was hopelessly inadequate.5 Once it became
clear that military victory was impossible, the Europeans cobbled together a face-saving diplomatic one, exacting promises of reduced piracy
(to which the Tunisians fleetingly adhered) plus a substantial monetary
tribute (which was apparently never paid).
All in all, the crusaders had lost 20 percent of their forces in the failed
assault, and more died of disease when they returned home, but these
costs were nothing next to the invasions long-term fallout. Under
political pressure to show something for their efforts and expenses,
Charles and Adorno trumpeted the crusade as an unmitigated success
for Christendom and for European commercial interests, and this, in
turn, began a cascade of defeats that would soon reduce Europe to a
shadow of its former glory.
Despite the Mahdian debacle, the enthusiasm of the returning nobles
helped recruit the major crusade directed at Nicopolis in Bulgaria six
years later, which would prove to be Europes last such adventure.6
Because the French had learned absolutely nothing from their failure, and still believed themselves supreme in war,7 their ill-conceived
assault on Nicopolis would not only cost a great many lives, it would
ultimately cost European control over the Bosporus, which was the continents primary conduit of trade and communication with the East and
the crux of its economic and political power. As a result, the Ottoman
Empire would soon rise and come to dominate large swaths of Central
Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. Only after centuries of colonization and global naval exploration would Europe regain its wealth
and influence.
In short, we can understand the Mahdian Crusade as a vital factor
(albeit one of many) leading to Europes downfall in the late Middle
Ages, like the proverbial butterfly whose flapping wings cause a tsunami
halfway around the world. Or as Sigismund, the king of Hungary (and
future Holy Roman emperor) said when the battle of Nicopolis was over,
We lost the day by the pride and vanity of these French.8
PI RACY CRUSADES OLD AND NEW
OVER SIX hundred years later, we are in the midst of another,

very different crusade, which nonetheless shares many similarities with
Mahdia and may threaten to wreak just as much havoc and destruction
over the long term. In this instance, it is Hollywood, rather than Genoa,
playing the role of the righteous crusader, with the US government as
its military ally, and digital technology innovators and their millions of
online users cast in the role of the pirates. While a variety of industries,
including film and software, have participated in this modern piracy crusade, the recording industry is its emblematic leader and continues to be
its most vocal advocate.
Im certainly not the first to make this comparison; a Google search
for the terms music industry piracy crusade currently yields over 4.3 million
results, and the metaphor is routinely applied in press coverage, including articles by the Hollywood Reporter,9 the New York Times,10 and MTV
News.11 It seems that nearly everyone but the recording industry and
its anti-piracy allies considers their efforts to be a crusade (and, as this
chapters epigraphs demonstrate, even they have wavered in their aversion to the term). As for the piracy side of the metaphor, it is the crusaders themselves who have devoted hundreds of millions of dollars and
considerable political influence to framing activities such as peer-to-peer
(P2P) file sharing and unlicensed streaming in these terms, and these
initiatives have been so successful that content-sharing websites such
as The Pirate Bay and pro-sharing political movements like the Pirate
Party have willingly wrapped themselves in the Jolly Roger, in a form of
rhetorical one-upmanship.
The similarities between todays piracy crusade and its fourteenthcentury predecessor are more than superficial, and more extensive than
a cursory comparison might suggest. To begin with, the two crusades
began under similar auspices. In both cases, it was an established commercial interest that promoted the engagement, in an effort to stem the
rising economic power of a competitive upstart that threatened to usurp
access to its goods and markets. In both cases, this commercial interest
courted assistance from a stronger ally, by framing its economic motives
in moral terms and painting the crusade itself as a matter of duty. In both
cases, the stronger ally agreed to participate in part because it seemed
like an easy political victory supported by a clear mandate. And in both
cases, the enemy was dehumanized and delegitimized by being branded
with the mark of piracy (even in the case of the Mahdians, who actually
did intercept and plunder ships rather than merely clicking buttons, the
4
I NTRODUCTION
so-called pirates perceived themselves as the Genoeses neighbors involved in an ongoing mutual seizure of goods, rather than as malicious
and unilateral aggressors).
There are also similarities in the circumstances of the crusade itself,
although the Genoese and the French were fighting for control over the
Mediterranean, while todays crusaders seek control over the Internet.
Like the Genoese, Hollywood and its allies have used excessive force
in place of actual strategy, and yet found their methods hopelessly inadequate as P2P networks and other digital pirates have strengthened their electronic garrisons in response to the siege. Like the French,
the US government was initially promised that its participation would
be brief and effective, only to find itself engaged in a classic quagmire.
As the major film studios pledged in a 2000 court filing, the strict new
copyright law for which they and the music industry had just fought
and won (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998) would suffice
to stop infringement, to stop digital piracy, before copying becomes
truly ubiquitous.12 Since then, dozens of newer, stricter laws and treaties
have been proposed, and many of them have been enacted, under similar
promises; yet unlicensed copying and distribution have only continued
to increase,13 as the stalemate between crusaders and pirates has expanded to encompass the globe and the collateral damages have continued to mount. Finally, like the Mahdians, the targets of todays crusade
are often surprised and dismayed to find themselves under assault, and
typically view their own activities as ethically valid, even if they do not
conform to the (ever-expanding) letter of the law.
The pride and vanity of the French has its analog in the attitudes
of todays crusaders, who invariably treat each newly enacted law and
treaty, and each newly concluded litigation, as a decisive turning point
for their cause. To cite a few such examples, the Recording Industry
Association of America (RIAA) called a 2000 settlement against MP3.
com a victory for the creative community and the legitimate marketplace,14 a 2001 court ruling against Napster a victory for copyright
holders,15 a 2005 Supreme Court decision against Grokster the dawn
of a new day,16 and a 2010 court ruling against LimeWire an extraordinary victory for the entire creative community.17 The industry also
frequently follows these legislative and litigious successes by promoting
research showing that online piracy has been diminished as a direct
result of their actions. The fact that these claims are often debunked
by independent third-party researchers,18 and that online sharing in the
aggregate continues to climb with every passing year, is conveniently

forgotten by the crusaders, and the press that cover them, until the next
legal campaign is mounted.
The most important, and troubling, similarities between the medieval
and modern piracy crusades can be seen in their devastating social aftermath. Just as overconfidence, bred by a false sense of victory in the
Mahdian Crusade, led directly to the Europeans rout at the hands of
the Turks in Nicopolis, the hype and false promises attending todays
piracy crusade have undermined the viability of the marketplace and the
strength of our democratic institutions, and obscure the fact that these
efforts have done nothing to protect the long-term interests of either the
crusaders themselves or the government institutions they rely upon as
allies.
Had the Genoese approached their Tunisian neighbors as partners
rather than waging holy war upon these supposed infidels, perhaps the
Ottomans would never have succeeding in dominating Mediterranean
Europe and North Africa in the centuries that followed. By the same
token, todays piracy crusaders have thus far squandered their opportunity to develop constructive partnerships with the legions of online innovators who have radically reimagined our social and cultural universe
in recent decades. This has prevented powerful new ideas and technologies from being fully exploited by either the legacy media industries or
new and emerging ones, and has impeded their adoption and use by the
general public. Even worse, the laws and policies that have been promoted as cures for the ostensible piracy epidemic have only succeeded
in strengthening the hands of those who oppose free speech, privacy, and
open discourse as well as the trolls and criminals who use such laws
to extort and defraud billions of dollars from legitimate businesses and
blameless individuals.
Ultimately, whats at stake in todays piracy crusade vastly exceeds
the consequences of Mahdia. Losing the ability to travel freely on the
Mediterranean cost the Europeans dearly, and it took centuries before
colonization, industrialization, and the cultural effects of the Renaissance
would provide the continent with new sources of wealth and innovation, and new avenues of exchange with the rest of the world.19 In the
meantime, Europeans losses amounted to gains for the Ottomans, who
provided their own contributions to both European and global society
and culture.20 But losing the ability to share information freely on the
Internet and other digital networks will have negative repercussions
for billions of people around the globe, and will benefit only a minute
6
I NTRODUCTION
handful of narrowly defined commercial and political interests. Today,

these networks are already foundational elements of our lives, from our
most intimate relationships21 to our most public dealings and debates.22
Online communications have brought together millions of couples, fueled the dreams of visionary entrepreneurs, and fomented major political
revolutions. In the years to come, networked digital technologies will
most likely play an even deeper role in our lives, becoming cognitive
prosthetics and cultural platforms to aid and augment human processes
from birth to death, and perhaps beyond. We cant afford to give that up
in the name of fighting our own shadows. This time, the pirate menace
isnt merely our neighbor across the seaits us.
THIS BOOK is not a traditional work of academic scholarship. To
be sure, I draw upon scholarly sources in a variety of fields, including
law and policy, critical theory, musicology, economics, anthropology,
history, international relations, neurobiology, and science and technology
studies. But my aim here is to develop a line of inquiry and a resulting
argument rather than to advance the theoretical foundations of a given
discipline.
This focus on practical consequences rather than pure theory owes
much to the fact that my personal interest in music as a subject of analysis
predates my academic career by a few decades. First of all, I have been a
songwriter and a musical performer since adolescence, and in the years
since then, I have published dozens of recordings and taken part in hundreds of performances with a wide variety of musical ensembles. Though
my ASCAP checks and gig money have never sufficed to pay the rent,
it would be accurate to say I am invested professionally in the music
economy as an artist.
Second, I have spent over fifteen years as a commercial researcher,
consultant, and business analyst focused on the intersection of digital
technologies and music economies, as an Internet analyst at Jupiter
Research during the dot-com years (19972002), and then as a principal
at Radar Research, a consultancy I cofounded with a former Jupiter colleague soon thereafter. In this capacity, my primary role has been to advance the interests of both media and technology companies (my clients
have included major labels and film studios as well as tech titans such
as Google and Microsoft), by delivering tactical research and strategic
advice regarding the distribution of music and other content via digital
channels for profit. I have also played the role of expert witness in several
court cases related to music, technology, and intellectual property
perhaps most notably as a witness for the defense in MGM v. Grokster,

the peer-to-peer file sharing suit decided by the US Supreme Court in
2005.23 Finally, I have written previously about the business, aesthetics,
and culture of music for a range of publications including the New York
Times and Billboard and in my first book, Mashed Up.
I recite my personal history here not with the aim of establishing my
credentials but rather to illustrate that I can hardly claim to approach this
book with clinical disinterest. To the contrary, I could not be more interested, or personally invested, in the continuing coevolution of music,
communication technology, and society. Yet my interest encompasses
multiple vantage points; I understand the conflicting needs and perspectives of musicians, listeners, policymakers, record labels, broadcasters,
and technology firms because I have stood in their shoes, so to speak.
My aim in this book is to ask questions and answer them in a way that
acknowledges this diversity of viewpoints and yet makes a strong case
for a specific course of action. Ultimately, I believe that everyone benefits
when free speech, civil liberties, and cultural innovation are privileged
over the narrowly defined interests of a handful of stakeholders; as history shows, those most resistant to change often come to embrace its
effects most ardently.
Yet, although I am hardly dispassionate, and though my explicit aim
is to debunk the dominant narrative informing the laws and policies
that govern the sharing of music via the Internet, I stake my position
firmly on the research rather than advocacy side of the fence. My primary
concern here is to erase ideology not to supplant it, thereby to bring a
saner and more clear-eyed perspective to the public debate over the role
that intellectual property plays in regulating the operations of the public
sphere and the marketplace.
In this respect, if The Piracy Crusade has a theoretical home within the
academic landscape, it belongs to the emerging field of critical information studies (CIS), a term first proposed by my colleague (and Science/
Technology/Culture series editor) Siva Vaidhyanathan in 2006 to describe the multidisciplinary confluence of work that focuses on the ways
in which culture and information are regulated by their relationship to
commerce, creativity and other human affairs.24 This orientation allows CIS researchers to put laws and policies in dialogue with cultural
and economic forces, rather than to treat each sphere as a discrete, and
unrelated, field of inquiry. Several of the scholars whose work I cite in
this book, such as Lawrence Lessig, Michael Carrier, Peter Drahos, John
Braithwaite, Jessica Litman, Joe Karaganis, Gabriella Coleman, Jonathan
8
I NTRODUCTION
Sterne, Nancy Baym, and Adrian Johns, have produced work that belongs to this field, even if they themselves do not always make the connection explicit.
This book also shares some of its DNA with research and advocacy
groups that exist primarily outside of the academy (although with many
points of scholarly contact). While there is not yet a single conceptual
tent to house these disparate interests, the free culture movement, the
free software movement, the access to knowledge movement, the transparency movement, the Internet freedom movement, and the open access movement all share an interest in reprioritizing communication
policy to privilege free speech, privacy, and innovation over the private
interests of market oligopolists.
Both as a mark of intellectual kinship with these movements and as a
practical method of honing my work by exposing it to scrutiny and critique, I opted to publish the draft of this book online as I wrote it and to
promote newly published pieces of it via Twitter, Facebook, and several
industry associations and online forums in which I regularly participate.
MediaCommons Press, an open scholarship platform, graciously offered
to host the book-in-progress,25 and in the five months from its launch to
the time of writing this final manuscript, the site has seen thousands of
page views and has garnered both public and private comments from
music industry executives, industry analysts, attorneys, and academic
researchers in addition to friends, family, and other interested parties
(the final manuscript has been considerably improved by this ongoing
feedback). Additionally, both the online book draft and this finished
version are available under the Creative Commons 3.0 AttributionNonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which grants noncommercial actors the freedom to read, reconfigure and redistribute it as long as I am
credited for the work.26
Finally, before I discuss the specific contents of this book, I believe a
word of clarification is required. I frequently use terms such as music
industry, recording industry, and music cartels to discuss the subjects of my research and analysis. Although such terms are, by virtue of
their brevity, imprecise, I do not use them interchangeably, and my aim
is to be as accurate as possible in my nomenclature. To be clear: when I
use the term music industry, I am discussing the broad constellation of
individuals and institutions that collectively exploit musical expression
for profit. At other times, I discuss a subset of this larger group, using
terms such as the broadcasting sector, the major labels, and so forth,
to pinpoint a specific group of actors whose interests are distinct from
those of the industry at large. When I speak of cartels, I refer specifically to the oligarchic corporations that exert disproportionate influence
on the economies and practices of the industry, through economic cooperation and, at times, collusion. Throughout the text, I bear in mind
John Williamson and Martin Cloonans argument that the notion of a
single music industry is an inappropriate model for understanding and
analyzing the economics and politics surrounding music. Instead it is
necessary to use the term music industries. 27 And I draw inspiration
from (and, I believe, give credence to) Patrik Wikstrms assertion that
the contemporary music industry is best understood as a copyright
industry.28
THE PIRACY CRUSADE has nine chapters in addition to this one,
which fall into three sections. The first section is about the legal and economic foundations of the music industry and about the complex relationship that the industry has historically had with innovative technologies.
Chapter 1 charts a brief social history of the music industry, from its
origins at the dawn of print publishing through the development of electronic recording and broadcasting in the twentieth century. The chapter
aims to show that our current ideas about music as a form of property,
and as a variety of entertainment, are neither natural nor inevitable, and
are instead the contingencies of specific social, economic, and technological forces and events over the past two hundred and fifty years.
Similarly, the chapter examines the origins of copyright as a regulatory
framework for the distribution of music in industrial society and as an
instrument of leverage and control for established commercial interests.
Chapter 2 examines the music industrys ambivalent relationship to
new technologies during the twentieth century. It begins by looking at
the progression of dominant recording formats, from the wax cylinder
to the MP3, and at the industrys wary reliance on the format replacement cycle as a continuing engine of new revenues and business models
on the one hand and a continuing threat to cartelized distribution on
the other. The chapter also charts the complex constellation of forces
that led to the broadcasting industrys rejection of the higher-quality FM
format for nearly half a century before it achieved market dominance
in the 1980s. Finally, it reviews the role of innovative music production
technologies in creating and maintaining an aesthetic pro/am gap to
distinguish between commercial and amateur recordings over the decades, as well as the social and economic implications of widely accessible recording and production tools in the digital age.
10
I NTRODUCTION
Chapter 3 reviews recent innovations in digital music technology,

and examines how the industrys resistance to these technologies (and
the markets embrace of them) diverge from the pattern established
over the prior century, undermining the industrys economic and political power. The chapter uses Elisabeth Kbler-Rosss well-known five
stages of grief 29 as an explanatory framework for these developments,
arguing that the industrys paralysis in the face of digital innovation was
the result of a kind of industrial psychological crisis, stemming from
an organizational inability to adapt to the changes wrought by digital
dematerialization.
The second section of the book directly challenges the dominant narrative surrounding the economic and structural changes the music industry has undergone in the digital age. The crusaders and the press
have largely painted the recording industrys measurable losses as a direct result of online piracy, but this claim doesnt stand up to available
evidence. Rather, the industry itself deserves the burden of the blame
for any misfortunes it may be suffering, stemming from its inability to
address digitization proactively and its problematic relations with artists,
consumers, and even its own business partners.
Chapter 4 takes a close look at the piracy crusades bte noir, peer-topeer file sharing. While there are certainly many other forms of online
music sharing that have emerged in recent years, P2P has remained the
best-known and most vilified among them, and its user base continues
to grow. The chapter summarizes a number of recent research studies
on the economic consequences of P2P, which fail to reach any consensus
on whether its net effect is positive, negative, or neutral. It also reviews
the many economic benefits of P2P for both artists and music industry
organizations, from concrete revenue opportunities to defrayed costs
to reputational enhancement. Finally, the chapter contrasts traditional
music economics with P2P, arguing that musicians have more to gain
from P2Ps potential strengths than they have to lose from the obsolescence of a system that has historically exploited their work.
Chapter 5 directly challenges the piracy crusaders claim that online piracy is responsible for most, or all, of the drop in music retail
revenue since the turn of the century. Using the recording industrys
own published sales data as a foundation, I review the many other factors that contributed to the perfect bubble in music sales from 1985 to
2000, as well as those that led to the perfect storm beginning in 2000.
I conclude the chapter by examining some of the industrys claims of
significant losses in jobs and productivity attributed to piracy. I show that
11
these claims are not only baseless, but are given the veneer of legitimacy
through repetition by reputable sources, and are then used as justification
for stricter anti-piracy laws and policies.
Chapter 6 investigates the role that the recording industrys own
actions have played in undermining its goodwill, and therefore its market
value and commercial earning power. The chapter begins by examining the industrys historical dealings with artists, consumers, and business partners, showing that, in each case, the major labels have relied
upon their oligopolistic market dominance to exact concessions that
have generated a simmering reservoir of bad will against the industry.
The chapter then looks at the labels more recent public education and
mass litigation campaigns, exploring the ways in which they have further
undermined public trust and respect. Finally, the chapter concludes by
reviewing some of the other major public relations fiascos the industry
has faced in recent years, from corruption scandals to massive computer
hacking charges.
The third and final section of the book focuses on the collateral
damage of the piracy crusade, measured in terms of delayed innovation,
failed enterprises, and, most important, threats to free speech and civil
liberties. The book concludes by arguing that the costs will only continue
to mount as we come to rely on networked communications increasingly
in our personal lives, public affairs and social institutions.
Chapter 7 uses interviews with music industry executives and visionary digital music entrepreneurs to present case studies for five failed
digital music initiatives over the past fifteen years. Although these initiatives are differentiated by the years and circumstances in which they
arose, each faced a similar fate: because the major record labels refused
to grant them viable licenses, they were unable to spread their innovations to musicians and audiences, impoverishing both the marketplace
and the musical public sphere. Ultimately, my industry sources explain,
these initiatives were starved to death or sued out of existence not because they lacked market viability, but precisely because they possessed
it; factions within the major labels, afraid of competition and unwilling
to take risks, opted to control a diminished marketplace rather than to
share a growing one.
Chapter 8 examines the most devastating consequences of the piracy
crusade: namely, the increasingly draconian laws and policies that have
governed the use of intellectual property since the dawn of the web.
The chapter aims to show that, far from isolated responses to discrete
legal threats, these laws and policies represent a coherent and consistent
12
I NTRODUCTION
anti-piracy agenda that sacrifices constitutional rights, civil liberties,

and international relations in the name of protecting the outmoded business models of a few multinational corporations. The chapter also traces
the origin of these policies to billions of dollars in lobbying and campaign
finance spent by these companies and their trade associations. Finally,
the chapter explores the very real social and political consequences of
the anti-piracy agenda, from organized crime to political repression to
the loss of millions of lives.
Chapter 9 concludes the book by looking at the potential long-term
costs of the piracy crusade. What will the world look like in a generation
or two, if the anti-piracy agenda continues to progress, while networked
communication technologies continue to advance and proliferate? How
can interpersonal relationships, creative communities, and democratic
political processes survive in an environment in which every song, every
e-mail, and every debate is subject to potential surveillance, censorship,
and misappropriation by powerful and unaccountable commercial and
government institutions? In addition to asking these questions, I also
review several alternatives to the piracy crusade promoted by both legislators and independent scholars.
Finally, I close by suggesting that the very notion of copyright itself is based on an industrial metaphor whose expiration date has long
since passed. In an era such as ours, in which our lives are so thoroughly
mediated by communication technologies, the line separating copying
from expression cant even be defined, much less policed. Ultimately, I
am hopeful that we can develop new methods of encouraging cultural
and technological innovation while providing economic benefits to those
who contribute creatively and financially to the process, in a way that
safeguards free speech and civil liberties now and for the foreseeable
future. But before we can get there, well need to end the crusade.
13
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PA R T I
Lock and Key: Music as

a Scarce Resource
AS RHETORICIANS and communication scholars
have long known, the way in which a debate is framed
is at least as important as the manner in which it is argued.
To accept a set of terms and definitions at the outset of a
conversation is to accept the worldview that gave rise to
those terms and therefore to preclude alternate interpretations of a given object or situation.
My aim in the first part of this book is to reframe the
debate surrounding music, technology, copyright, and
piracy by examining the historical circumstances that
gave rise to our current understanding of their meanings
and relationships. This is a necessary precondition if we
are to have a more nuanced understanding of the complex
changes currently taking place within our musical cultures
and industries, as well as our legal systems, as digital networked technologies continue to grow in power and scope.
To reduce the staggering diversity of innovative digital
music technologies and practices that have emerged over
the past fifteen years to a simple permission/theft binary is
not only to miss the point of these innovations completely
but to ensure that they can never be effectively integrated
into our cultural, legal, and commercial systems. Instead,
we must take a first principles approach to understanding
15
the role that music plays in society, the methods by which

it has been commercially exploited and legally categorized,
and the reasons for which these decisions were made.
In the chapters that follow, I examine the coevolution
of music, technology, law, and industry, from the dawn of
movable type, through the era of recording and broadcasting, and, finally, to the emergence of the networked age.
Seen from this vantage point, we can understand what is
currently referred to as digital music piracy as merely
one in a long line of innovative disruptions, rather than the
death knell of a static and unchanging industry.
16
LOCK AND KEY: MUSIC AS A SCARCE RESOURCE
CHAPTER 1
Stacking the Deck

The Monopolization of Music
THE EARLY years of the twenty-first century have been a tumultuous time within the music industry and musical culture at large. Many
people working throughout the recording, publishing, and broadcasting
sectors are legitimately concerned that they may lose their jobs, or even
their careers. The new digital communications tools that have changed
the way we work, play, and express ourselves have also altered our relationship to music. On the one hand, they have whetted our appetite for
making, hearing, and sharing it in greater volume and variety than ever
before. On the other, they have underscored the limitations of twentiethcentury music technologies, and in so doing have undermined their viability in the marketplace.
To many within the music industry, the problem appears very clear.
Enabled by illegal technologies, millions of consumers have turned to
piracy because the lure of free music is too great to pass up. This renders traditional commerce impossible. Why would anyone pay for something when its just sitting there, waiting to be taken? The only possible
way forward is to use copyright laws, security technologies, and consumer education to contain the threat and mitigate the damage.
To many outside the industry, the situation seems equally simple,
but the blame is reversed. Instead of supporting or embracing exciting
new platforms that allow people to enjoy music to the fullest extent possible, the industry has attempted to squelch innovation at every turn,
using copyright laws, security technologies, and propaganda as their
weapons. The only possible way forward is to move deeper and deeper
underground, using cutting-edge technologies that the industry hasnt
yet learned about or figured out how to kill.
17
Both arguments appear to have merit, but they originate from such
irreconcilable vantage points that they can never generate a meaningful
dialogue, let alone come to a satisfying accord. What both viewpoints
lack is a degree of historical perspective. Where did this cat-and-mouse
game begin? How did the recording industry come to possess the powers
it wields? When did music sharers become pirates? In this chapter, I
argue that music began as a public good and trace the course of its
gradual propertization, as well as the development of the legal framework that enabled this process. I also examine the history of music
piracy and discuss some of the ways in which our uses of the term today
diverge from those of the past.
Although my own vantage point is largely critical of the music industrys most powerful organizations, I also sympathize with those who feel
threatened by the changes at hand. It is my hope that, by providing a
broader context for todays conflicts both in this chapter and throughout
the book, I can help to navigate a better path forward than the stonewalling, violence, and recrimination that have characterized industryconsumer relations thus far.
Music of the People, by the People, for the People

What is music?
For those of us who came of age in late twentieth- or early twentyfirst-century America, the answer may seem obvious. Its a form of entertainment, a packaged product, and a powerful (if sometimes infuriating) industry dedicated to the manufacture and exploitation of that
product. Music is what wins Grammys, its what the M in MTV used
to stand for, its the stuff that Super Bowl halftime shows are made of.
And musical artistsreal artists, the kind with major label deals and
professional-quality videosare a type of brand. Like our choices in
clothing, movies, and computers, the music we buy, watch, and listen
to says something about who we are, what groups we belong to, and
what kind of values we have.
Theoretically speaking, if I were to amend my Facebook profile tomorrow to delete musicians like Thievery Corporation, Fela Kuti, and
Ornette Coleman and replace them with popular acts like Toby Keith,
Kelly Clarkson, and Drake, my closest friends and family would think
I had gone crazy, was pulling a lame prank, or had entered a desperate
phase of midlife crisis (and theyd probably be right). Its an entirely reasonable assumption that I might enjoy the music recorded by these art18
CHAPTER 1
ists, but as a forty-year-old, northeastern American musician/professor/

retired hipster, it would be completely uncharacteristic for me to define
myself publicly by affiliating with them.
Music means many things to many people, and it continues to play
an important role in churches, parties, and politics. But our primary use
for it as a society is arguably as a form of cultural capital,1 a marker of
identity acquired through the acts of public consumption and affiliation.
Musics intrinsic power to bond groups and communicate affinities has
been adapted to the logic of late capitalism and harnessed to serve its
dictates. And the control of this power has been restricted to a dwindling
handful of very large corporations with an ever-growing scope of legal
authorization to decide what the rest of us do with music. The more
normal and inevitable this relationship between music and the market
seems, the less likely we are to question the underlying premises of our
social and economic systems. Yet, as I discuss in my book Mashed Up,2
the long-standing association between modern musical codes and social
institutions may be nearing its end, or at least approaching a radical reformulation; our market-based assumptions about music no longer make
sense when we look at the increasingly diverse ways in which we use it
in our daily lives.
Music and the marketplace havent always been so deeply intertwined;
in the scope of human history, its a relatively new development. In recent
years, scholars in a variety of social and biological sciences have begun to
converge on the question of why human beings seem uniquely adapted
to make and respond to music, and their answers, though still tentative, offer some fascinating clues about its enduring sway over our lives
and societies. The neurobiologist Mark Changizi, for instance, makes a
compelling argument that music is, neurologically speaking, a kind of
sonic code for human motion that hacks into our nervous systems and
redirects our interests and energies. Without music, Changizi argues,
humans could never have evolved beyond our wet biology to become
the socially organized, self-aware, culturally immured creatures we are
today.3 Similarly, scholars such as Oliver Sacks4 and Daniel Levitin5 have
argued that music is one of the most complex and comprehensive aspects
of human consciousness, and that music not only was central to human
evolution but remains vital to our cognitive and social processes from
infant development to the treatment of age-related dementia. In short,
music isnt just something we manufacture, like cars and shoes; its something that shaped us as a species, and continues to shape each of us as
individuals throughout our lives.
STACKING THE DECK
19
Of course, we dont need to invoke prehistory or biology to find

musical traditions and applications that fall outside the confines of the
marketplace. As a great many cultural historians and ethnomusicologists
have demonstrated, musics current role as a commodity is the exception, rather than the rule. In most societies, for most of the past five
thousand years, music has served other functions, and other masters.
For nonindustrialized societies such as the Mbuti of Zaire,6 the Venda of
South Africa,7 and the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea,8 musics central role
(often in the company of dance) has been to bind together communities
and reaffirm the values and philosophies that united them. In feudal and
dynastic societies, music served as a kind of public news medium, as
well as a vector of oral history; jongleurs, griots, bards, minstrels, skalds,
and udgatars, though specialized conveyors of musical information, were
hardly its owners or monopolists. Even within postindustrial societies,
a great many uses of music still fall beyond the markets expanding footprint; from traditional music styles such as blues and bluegrass to
quotidian musical events like birthday parties and religious ceremonies,
music is still sometimes produced without claims to ownership or the
promise of remuneration.
Consequently, as many economists and legal scholars have observed,9
music outside of its commodity context can be understood as a kind
of public gooda universally accessible, ubiquitous resource that all
members of a society may draw upon to fulfill their individual and collective needs. Similarly, to use a term introduced by the media theorist
James Carey, music can be understood as a quintessential form of ritual
communicationin his words, communication directed not toward
the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation
of shared beliefs.10 In other words, music today may be a product, an
industry, and a talisman of consumer culture, but it has always been,
and continues to be, a constituent element of human consciousness and
collective social action as well. And in an age marked by the increasing
corporate ownership of culture as well as a rapidly evolving person-toperson networked communications infrastructure, these two functions
of music have come into an ever greater degree of conflict.
Music and the Marketplace

At what point did music cease to be merely an aspect of human life akin
to speaking, dancing and dreaming, and become something that can be
20
CHAPTER 1
bought and sold, shared and stolen, stockpiled and monopolized? When,
and how, did music become a commodity?
Despite its historical status as a public good, music has never been
completely free. Powerful social institutions have always played a role in
regulating musical aesthetics, practices and technologies. From dynastic
Egypt and China to present-day America, musics capacity to influence
peoples behavior, opinion, and collective action has always been recognized as a vital tooland a dangerous weaponby those holding the
reins of power.11 Yet throughout most of history, this power has been
exercised politically, militarily, religiously, and ideologically; only with
the dawn of modern capitalism did music enter the marketplace and
thereby become regulated through economic measures as well.
The French economist Jacques Attali has argued persuasively that,
in the Western world, this shift began in the fourteenth century, at the
birth of the Renaissance. At this time, he writes, the age of minstrels and
jongleurs began to wane, and musicians became professionals bound
to a single master, domestics, producers of spectacles exclusively reserved
for a minority.12 This was part of a broader trend; throughout the Renaissance, all of the cultural behaviors we now consider fine arts were
professionalized and separated from more common, craft-oriented, and
unmarketable ones, and professional artists were distinguished from
mere amateurs and audiences.13 In that cultural moment, the music industry was born.
It is no coincidence that, at the very time when control over music and
the arts shifted from religious to market mechanisms, the political power
of the church was diminishing and that of the bourgeoisie was rising. Not
only did the professionalization of music turn musicians themselves into
commodities, requiring that people pay for access to something which
had hitherto been free, but the new musical modes of production actually served to validate the underlying logic of the market system itself. If
access to music could be bought and sold, then what other aspect of the
human experience could legitimately be excluded from the marketplace?
Over time, the new focus on professionalization within music crystallized into an emerging set of aesthetics that didnt just reward professional skills, but demanded them. By the turn of the nineteenth century,
the shift was complete; as the music historian Joel Sachs argues, the
modern music of the time emphasized virtuosity as a way to exclude
both amateur musicians and uneducated audiences.14 These new aesthetics, in turn, paved the way for an even greater set of social transformations, centered around industrialization and massification. As the
STACKING THE DECK
21
musicologist Christopher Small writes, the professionalization of music,

and the resulting exclusion of the consumer from the musical process,
can be linked directly to the homogenization of human relationships
brought about by the industrial society of today.15
Even as musicians were becoming a commodity through the process
of professionalization, musical expression itself was undergoing a simultaneous and parallel transformation. Although systems of musical notation have existed for millennia, it was only with the dawn of movable
type in the fifteenth century that the concept of an intrinsically valuable
musical score began to take hold. Unlike mere notation, scores can be
understood as something logistically prior to, and of equivalent commercial value to, musical performance. In other words, they stand on
their own as independent musical commodities, whether theyre used by
amateurs or professionals, or merely sit gathering dust on a bookshelf.
Also with the increasing capacity for large-scale print reproduction came
the standardization of notation, which in the sixteenth century crystallized into the five-line staff system we know today. With standardized
notation and cost-effective mechanical reproduction came the growth
of an international music community, and a marketplace for the scores
that bound that community together. In time, this marketplace led to the
development of a printing industry and a professional publishing field.
And for centuries, this field has been organized around the mechanism
of copyright.
The Origins of Copyright

Countless authors have documented the boggling array of meanings,
forms, and functions represented by the word copyright from age to
age and nation to nation. Put simply, it is a set of property laws establishing who has the right to communicate (or prevent the communication
of) ideas, to whom, via what media, and under which circumstances. To
say more than that is to enter into a hotly contested theoretical arena,
in which virtually any assertion or interpretation tends to be viewed as
an ideological declaration. Although it is not my aim here to present a
comprehensive history of copyright, or even to stake out a particularly
partisan perspective on the subject, my argument cant proceed without
a brief review of its history and some of its basic functions.
Most historians of copyright trace its origins to 1557, when a group of
English book publishers received a royal charter to become the Company
of Stationers of London. This charter gave the company the power to
22
CHAPTER 1
grant a stationers copyright to a given publisher, conferring exclusive

privileges to reproduce a given work. As the legal scholar Lyman Ray
Patterson describes it, the primary purpose of the stationers copyright
was to provide order within the . . . book trade,16 essentially stabilizing
market rates and practices, and minimizing the risk of outside competition or internal strife. Yet, from the very beginning, this proto-copyright
law had a secondary function: state control over the content of the public
sphere, and by extension, a monarchical check on the rising power of
the bourgeoisie. In Pattersons words, censorship was a major policy
of the English government. The stationers charter, therefore, granted
the company large powers . . . in order to have them serve as policemen of the press.17 Given the central role that political pamphleteers
and publishers would play in the Glorious Revolution of 1668 and the
American Revolution a century later, the British crowns concern was
clearly well warranted.
Ironically, one of the unintended early consequences of copyright
was to accelerate the consolidation of the publishing industry. By raising
the barriers to entry for newcomers, creating exclusive rights to exploit
popular works, and thus spurring new economies of scale, copyright laws
helped to ensure that publishing would become a field dominated by a
few large firms. This, in turn, eventually helped to undermine the unilateral power of the monarchies themselves, as the concentrated capital
and political influence of the biggest publishing houses would make
them increasingly autonomous.
It was only in the eighteenth century, after these political and economic changes were well under way, that copyright became something
conferred on British authors by statute rather than on publishers via
membership in the company, and similar laws were enacted elsewhere
in Europe as well. In the United States, which came into being just as this
shift was taking place, the question of whether to have copyright laws at
all was hotly debated by the founding fathers; while Thomas Jefferson
abhorred such laws as a form of monopoly, James Madison considered
them a necessary evil as encouragements to literary works and ingenious discoveries.18 Ultimately, the US Constitution would provide the
foundation for all copyright laws that have followed, by giving Congress
the power 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.
In the two and a half centuries since this clause was penned, the founding fathers debate has continued to reverberate through American legal
STACKING THE DECK
23
scholarship and the creative industries. Why do we have copyright? What

are its costs, and its benefits? The Madisonian view that it provides an incentive for skilled individuals to produce and share innovative concepts,
thus contributing to what John Stuart Mill called the marketplace of
ideas and enriching our cultural environment, still reigns as the primary
rationale.19 A more economically oriented, neoclassical view holds that
copyright enables culture to enter the marketplace because thats where
the true value of a work is established, and this valuation guides future
investment in similar work.20 A regulatory understanding of copyright
views it as an instrument of policy, setting the terms for competition
between rival media and communications firms.21 A more critical approach would hold that the propertization of culture makes authors and
composers beholden to the dictates of the marketplace (undermining
their independence and resistant capacity) and masks the inherently collective nature of cultural production by ascribing ownership over ideas
to discrete individuals.22 These are not mutually exclusive viewpoints,
and either way, the effect of this function has been the same: namely,
providing a legal basis for the professionalization of music and the commodification of musical expression. In other words, copyright is the glue
that binds music to the marketplace.23
Growing Industry, Expanding Copyright

From the music industrys inception through the beginning of the twentieth century, printed scores were the primary commercial music product, and throughout this period, music publishers were the industrys
dominant, and growing, economic power. In the United States, most
sheet music was imported from Europe during the colonial era, but
around the time of the Revolution, a homegrown music publishing industry emerged, initially dedicated to printing sacred anthologies. Many
early American publishers, such as Benjamin Carr of Philadelphia, were
composers as well, seeking a commercial outlet for their own work.24
With relatively small catalogs and limited reach, their businesses were
in many ways more akin to todays DIY music producers than to the
large, established publishing houses that account for most of the compositions we hear on contemporary radio and television programs.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, as the young American republic
started to establish a coherent sense of its cultural identity, a popular
music industry, dedicated to the printing of more secular and socially
oriented scores, began to form. Within the first quarter of the century,
24
CHAPTER 1
these new publishers had released nearly ten thousand secular titles in
a broad range of genres and themes,25 many of them tailored to suit the
needs of the countrys growing bourgeoisie, an increasing number of
whom boasted pianos and other instruments in their homes.
Although it may seem surprising, given the emphasis we place on
intellectual property as an incentive for musical creation and distribution, American law did not provide copyright for printed scores at this
time. Composers and publishers in Europe had the ability to copyright
music in the late eighteenth century, but only with the Copyright Act of
1831 were musical scores considered eligible in the United States.26 Ironically, as the music historian Richard Crawford suggests, the introduction
of copyright may have undermined the domestic market for American
composers in the nineteenth century because it created an incentive for
profit-oriented publishers to distribute European works (for which they
didnt owe a royalty) rather than domestic ones (for which they did).
As he writes, the American appetite for European music owed much
to the notion that Old World culture was superior. But the dollars-andcents advantage to publishers also promoted the circulation of foreign
music.27 This is an early, and notable, example of how the financial interests of the music industry, enforced through the mechanism of copyright, can often come into direct conflict with the cultural and economic
interests of musicians and audiences.
The American publishing industry continued to grow sharply throughout the nineteenth century, in conjunction with the rise of minstrelsy,
expanding national borders and accelerating technological change. By
the middle of the century, five thousand titles were being published each
year. By the turn of the twentieth century, this number had grown to
twenty-five thousand songs per year, and a single hit song from commercial songwriting capital Tin Pan Alley, such as After the Ball by
Charles Harris (1892), could sell millions of copies. Throughout this era
of rapid expansion, the largest music publishers worked to reinforce their
industry dominance and economic power on legal fronts, by lobbying to
expand the scope and duration of copyright, and strategically, by using
song pluggers, trade associations, and other forms of market leverage
to promote their songs among performers, music sellers, and potential
purchasers.
As the music industry expanded, so did the scope of copyright law. In
the span of a few generations, American copyright developed from zero
statutory protection for music in 1830 to the coverage of scores (1831),
public performances (1897), and mechanical reproduction (e.g., piano
STACKING THE DECK
25
rolls and phonograph records, 1909), while the term of copyright doubled
from fourteen years (renewable for another fourteen) to twenty-eight
years (renewable for another twenty-eight) and statutory penalties for
copyright violation expanded from pennies per page to imprisonment.28
These changes were brought about, at least in part, by an increasing degree of organization, collaboration, and even collusion among
the nations largest music publishers. In 1855, the first music industry
trade association, dubbed the Board of Music Trade, was founded, with
the explicit aim of stemming price-cutting. By 1880, this association had
grown to encompass every major publisher, renamed itself the Music
Publishers Association (MPA), and clarified that its purpose was the
regulation of the music trade by fixing and sustaining a uniform and
standard price for all music publishers.29 From this point to the present
day, music industry trade organizations have played an active role both
in the process of regulating industry practices and pricing (sometimes in
violation of antitrust law, as I discuss in chapter 6), and in lobbying for
continual copyright expansion. As early as 1909, for instance, the MPA
was actively lobbying for a copyright term of the composers life plus fifty
years30 (this ambition would finally be realized in 1976, and surpassed in
1998).
The same economic, legal, and technological expansion that helped
the music publishers to grow in power throughout the nineteenth century would contribute to their relative decline in the twentieth. After
World War I, the rapidly evolving capabilities of audio recording and
broadcasting technology gave rise to two new powers in the music
industrythe record labels and radio networks. These sectors exploded
in size and power, and before long, they had outstripped music publishing both economically and politically. Following in the footsteps of
music publishers, the larger labels and broadcasters consolidated their
market share, founded influential trade organizations, and played a central role in the continuing expansion of copyright, placing an ever-greater
range of musical practices and products into private (primarily corporate)
hands, and eliminating them from the freely shared cultural commons
for a functional eternity.
As the music industry and the legal apparatus that binds it both ballooned in the wake of technological advancement, its economic and
institutional foundations crystallized around the idiosyncrasies of these
particular technologies. Much as molten glass will harden in the form of
any mold into which its poured, the twentieth-century music industry
slowly ossified in the form of its own enabling technologies, such as the
26
CHAPTER 1
vinyl record and AM/FM radio. In turn, these newly fixed industrial practices were reinforced by further legal and technological development, in
a self-perpetuating cycle.
By the second half of the century, the industry had fully congealed
around the broadcasting/label dichotomy, with the former sector based
on advertising-supported, over-the-air programming, and the latter based
on consumer-supported, over-the-counter retail distribution. Although
they both solved essentially the same problemthat is, capitalizing on
consumer demand for access to recorded musicthe two sectors consisted of entirely different firms operating according to separate laws and
licenses, using totally distinct technologies, and deriving income from
two entirely separate sources. There was a great degree of symbiosis
between these sectors (radio promoted the sales of recordings, while
recordings provided programming for broadcasters), but there was also
friction; for instance, the decades-long debate over whether broadcasters
should pay labels a royalty for public performance of their recordings or
whether the promotional value of airtime obviated such a need.31
Despite such tensions, this arrangement persisted for the better part
of a century, weathering continuing technological innovation and shifting political tides. As 78 rpm records gave way to 45 rpm singles, LPs,
cassettes, 8-tracks, and CDs and as stereo FM supplanted mono AM as
the dominant broadcast format, radio conglomerates ruled their roost
and record labels ruled theirs, while the once-powerful music publishers
stood by as largely silent partners to each. As I argue throughout this
book, part of the reason that twenty-first-century digital communications technologies have proven so disruptive to the music industry is
precisely because they undermine the theoretical distinction between
broadcasting and retail, thereby upsetting the elaborate ecosystem that
has emerged around this distinction, bringing former market allies into
greater competition and conflict with one another and muddying the
legal and economic waters.
At the end of the twentieth century, on the cusp of this change, the
American music industry had reached the apex of its concentrated political and economic power. In 1999, the field was dominated by five
major record labels (soon to be three), four large publishers (all of them
affiliated with major labels), four major radio groups, and a single music
television titan (Viacom), wielding copyright powers that had been extended significantly by two radically expansive pieces of legislation in the
previous year,32 and consolidating rapidly in the wake of recent media
deregulation.33 Collectively, this handful of highly litigious corporations,
STACKING THE DECK
27
and their trade associations, controlled more than just the music marketplace; they regulated global musical culture to a degree that is arguably
unparalleled in history. In practice, this meant everything from the
broadly general (e.g., promoting and censoring different styles, genres,
and artists; shaping and constraining the development of music recording and playback technology) to the minutely specific (e.g., threatening
to sue Girl Scout camps for allowing campers to sing Woody Guthrie
songs;34 micromanaging and tracking consumers music listening habits
through the use of digital rights management technology).
In short, the music industry as it existed immediately before the introduction of the pioneering file sharing service Napster was hardly a
timeless, or even a particularly stable, institution. Its economic and legal
foundations had accreted around the idiosyncrasies of an outmoded technological system, and its unprecedented cultural power was the result
of two centuries of sustained concentration of ownership and successful
lobbying for ever-greater degrees of copyright protection over a broadening field of musical practices and products. What had once been a public good and a native form of ritual communication for our species had
been successfully commodified, and then monopolized by a multibilliondollar cartel, but the very rationale for this cartels existence was already
being called into question.
Music as Entertainment
The portrait Ive just painted is somewhat at odds with the popular narrative of the music industrys formation. Most histories, biographies,
and documentaries tend to focus on stylistic disruptions (e.g., how
rock n roll fomented youth rebellion in the 1950s and 60s), or the
larger-than-life personalities of celebrated music industry executives
(e.g., how Walter Yetnikoff of CBS Records waged war on Steve Ross
of Warner Communications, while injecting untold millions of dollars
into superstar contracts and mob-related promotion companies).35 To
the extent that corporate strategy and copyright law are invoked at all,
they tend to be treated as peripheral to the storyexecutive gambits
and the rules of the game, respectively. And though few dimensions of
the music industry typically escape the scrutiny of critics and historians,
one thing thats often taken for granted is the industrys raison detre;
namely, the premise that music is an untapped resource just waiting
to be mined by entrepreneurial spirits capitalizing on the demand for
entertainment.
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As should be clear from my discussion in the previous section, the

characterization of music as a natural resource was a necessary conceit
for the process of commodification; only by metaphorically invoking
industrial models of production could this universal public good be successfully privatized. Yet, in order to make this economic sleight of hand
both believable and palatable, a second conceit was necessary as well.
If music-as-resource satisfies the supply side of the industrial metaphor,
then music-as-entertainment satisfies the demand side of the equation.
Obviously, music has always been entertaining. Whether we are participating in the process of making it, or just bearing witness to a ritual or
performance, we generally find music pleasurable, emotionally gratifying, and at times even transporting. And, at least since the earliest days
of minstrelsy, music has been an attraction specifically sought out by
those looking to experience such things. But the concept of music as a
discrete product of a larger entertainment industry, categorically similar to movies, books, and games, is a relatively new idea.
Many cultural historians agree that the premise of entertainment as
we now think of itas a commercial diversion from the demands and
cares of our daily livesemerged with the dawn of consumer culture
in the late nineteenth century. However, theorists differ on the reason
for this shift. Within a Marxian analytical framework, especially among
the Frankfurt School, the entertainment industry serves the purpose of
rationalizing and ameliorating the alienation of labor during industrialization; workers, deprived of the opportunity to take pleasure in their
work, must purchase that pleasure in the form of commodities, thereby
perpetuating the capitalist logic at the heart of their alienation.36 Others
have argued that consumer culture was deliberately manufactured by the
ruling elites as an instrument of control over the growing ranks of recent
immigrants and the working class.37 Still others view it as a less coercive
and more negotiated process: either the result of dialectical tensions between top-down and bottom-up social forces,38 or the inevitable result of the increasing complexity of postindustrial capitalist society and
the expanding role of the marketplace in daily life.39
Regardless of the power dynamics that heralded its arrival, the era
of consumer culture has been marked by the relegation of music to the
category of entertainment and the gradual obfuscation of its other, older
functions. The premise that music is a commercial product, developed as
a natural resource and packaged to serve consumer demand, seems obvious to the point of transparency. Many analyses of contemporary music
culture and industry treat this point as axiomatic, never taking care to
STACKING THE DECK
29
ask whether or why music should be exploited in this way, but only who
should be doing the exploiting, and under what conditions. This dynamic
occurs both within and outside the academy, and among both those
who sympathize with the commercial music industry and those who
challenge it. It is unsurprising, if rather telling, that the recording industrys own publications refer to the selling of music as creative product
exploitation,40 but a bit more problematic when a nonprofit organization offering education, research and advocacy for musicians produces
events and publications titled The Band as Business.41 There seem to
be few advocates for music or musicianship outside of a commercial
context, and little recognition of musics role outside of entertainment.
The fact that skilled and venerated musicians such as Elvis Presley and
Michael Jackson, both of whom died relatively young as a result of sustained self-abuse, have been publicly quoted claiming that our job is
to entertain,42 suggests some of the human costs of this paradigm, and
Kurt Cobains Generation X rallying cry, Here we are now, entertain
us, perfectly encapsulates the ambivalence felt by both musicians and
audiences confronted by such market reductionism.
I am not simply making an art-for-arts-sake argument here, or suggesting that creative expression is some pure and delicate substance corrupted by the nefarious influence of capitalism. Nor am I suggesting that
musicians shouldnt take advantage of the opportunities the marketplace
offers, and equip themselves with the same degree of leverage and expertise as any other labor force negotiating with an industry that exploits its
work. My aim is simply to point out that the economic privatization of
music has required us to adopt a framework of analysis whose totalizing
effect is to reduce our expectations of musics social application to the
limitations of entertainment as a field,43 thereby undermining alternative measures of value and systems of reward and incentive. And despite
the measurable success of music as a commercial product, and the thousands of willing laborers within its industrial economy, this compromise
still sits uneasily with us as a society, and weighs on none more heavily
than the musicians who succeed the most in market terms.
Music and Piracy

The name of this book is The Piracy Crusade, and I would be remiss if
I didnt spend some time in this introductory chapter discussing the
concept of piracy as well. Usually, when a child dresses up as a pirate
for Halloween, the outfit might include a false peg leg, an eye patch,
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and even a plush parrot doll for good measure. The child will swagger
around with plastic cutlass in hand, uttering phrases like Arrrghh and
Shiver me timbers! and generally making things difficult for younger
siblings and house pets. Adults occasionally like to play pirate as well,
and each year on September 19, hundreds of thousands around the
world celebrate International Talk Like A Pirate Day by adopting this
garb and garbled speech to one degree or another. At the time of writing, people have paid over $3.7 billion in box office ticket sales just to see
Johnny Depp swashbuckling across the screen as Captain Jack Sparrow
in the Walt Disney Companys massively successful Pirates of the Caribbean movie franchise.44 For most of us, he is the dictionary definition of
a pirate.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI; the
global trade association for record labels) has a very different definition.
On their website, a page titled What is piracy?45 mentions nothing
about ships, parrots, or cutlasses. Instead, they use the term to mean the
deliberate infringement of copyright on a commercial scale, and identify
four types relevant to their industry: physical music piracy, counterfeits, bootlegs, and Internet piracy. In this fourth category, the IFPI
acknowledges that even its own definition of piracy doesnt really apply.
Internet piracy, they argue, is not necessarily due to the motivation of
the perpetrator. So much for deliberate. They also claim that the term
refers more generally to any use of creative content on the Internet that
violates copyright. So much for commercial scale. Given the fact that
since the enactment of the 1976 Copyright Act every piece of text, audio,
video, and imagery ever created is automatically subject to copyright,
anyone who e-mails, blogs, or shares any document, song, video clip, or
image he or she did not personally create from scratch is, according to
the IFPI, a pirate. So much for Johnny Depp.
How can this one word mean two such different things? Is the distinction between Blackbeard and BoingBoing merely one of scale and means,
or are they truly as different as they seem? What possible similarity can
exist between blasting a ship to smithereens and making off with its bullion, and posting a mashup to Facebook? In order to address these questions, we need to look briefly at the history of the concept of piracy itself,
and trace its evolution from antiquity to the present day. Fortunately,
other researchers have done a lot of this work already, so I will try my
best to give credit where it is due, lest I be branded a pirate myself.
As it turns out, the definition of piracy has been continually revised
and debated since its earliest appearance. Cicero, writing two thousand
STACKING THE DECK
31
years ago, was the first to outline a comprehensive definition and theory
of piracy, arguing that pirates are those who, by virtue of being the
common enemy of all, have forfeited all rights, including those to fair
dealing. For example, he wrote, if an agreement is made with pirates
in return for your life, and you do not pay the price, there is no deceit,
not even if you swore to do so and did not.
Daniel Heller-Roazen, a professor of literature who uses Ciceros
words to title his excellent social history The Enemy of All: Piracy and the
Law of Nations, argues that the exceptionalism inherent in Ciceros definition is the thread that ties together all subsequent concepts of piracy. He
identifies four distinguishing features of this paradigm: first, piracy must
take place outside of traditional legal regions (e.g., on the high seas);
second, piracy is committed by an agent of universal antagonism;
third, piracy collapses the categorical distinction between the criminal
and the political; fourth, and consequent to the first three features, piracy
requires a redefinition of war. From the beginning, then, piracy has operated as a kind of negative categorya placeholder for malicious actors
and activities that fall outside obvious social and political categorization.
What it hasnt always meant is the theft of property; this property/theft
dialectic, so central to our contemporary understanding of piracy, is a
relatively recent affair, likely dating to the dawn of modern nation-states
and international commerce. As Heller-Roazen observes, even plunder
on the high seas was considered a legitimate economic model and political tactic for most of history, until international accords in the midnineteenth century abolished privateering, and in so doing, relegated the
plunderers that remained to the negative category of pirates.46
The application of the term piracy to what we now call intellectual
property is of relatively recent vintage, as well. As the professor of history
Adrian Johns demonstrates, this use of the term can be traced directly to
the dawn of the modern publishing industry in late seventeenth-century
England, from whence it spread to other Western European nations.
Like Heller-Roazen, Johns emphasizes that the definition of piracy has
always been fluid, a matter of placeof territory and geopolitics. In
this case, the territory was the modern European nation-state, and the
geopolitics involved the international trade in mass-produced printed
goods. And although the IFPIs definition hinges on the infringement of
copyright, Johns makes it clear that the term was not only adopted prior
to the development of copyright, it was actually a constituent element
of the original argument in favor of legal protection for publishers. In
Johnss words, the invention of copyright itself was largely a response to
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a piracy feud overflowing with national resentments between publishers

in London and Scotland.47
Unlike textual piracy, the concept of music piracy does not seem to
have existed before copyright. Although the concept of musical plagiarism had begun to emerge along with eighteenth-century notions of
authorship, it wasnt until the turn of the twentieth century that the
music industry identified piracy as a systematic problem. According to
Johns, the problem arose from the confluence of two factors, one on the
supply side (photolithography, which offered rapid, inexpensive reproduction) and the other on the demand side (the boom in piano ownership). Earlier in this chapter, I described the process by which the music
industry successfully lobbied for an ever greater scope of legal control
over the works they published. Arguably, this gradual encroachment on
what had previously been a musical commons constituted a third factor in the growth of music piracy. As Johns acknowledges, the industrys
monopolistic practices at the end of the nineteenth century contributed
to a widespread . . . sense of resentment at the traditional music publishing companies on the part of consumers, which in turn conferred a
degree of social legitimacy on pirate publishers.48
Even throughout most of the twentieth century, the concept of music
piracy referred primarily to unlicensed publishers and manufacturers
undercutting the market for legitimate commercial goods. It wasnt
until the 1970s that an entirely new paradigm emerged: home piracy.
Two factors contributed to this change. First, the development of the
phonorecord copyright in 1972 (which covers the sound of a recording,
rather than the composition that has been recorded, and confers master
use rights on the owner) gave the record labels a greater incentive and
stronger set of tools to police and punish unlicensed reproductionists.
Second, the development of home electronics based on magnetic tape
(especially the microcassette format) gave musicians and listeners far
greater power to reproduce, alter, and redistribute musical recordings.
Because these behaviors were even more difficult to control than traditional music piracy, the extension of the term piracy to cover noncommercial reproduction was largely rhetorical in nature. In fact, it had
no legal basis in the United States; Congress explicitly declined to prohibit
home taping in its 1972 law, and subsequent to its passage, judges . . .
acted as though an exemption for home taping existed.49 Even some
official and semi-official organs of the music industry had a hard time
accepting that home taping constituted a piratical act; as late as 1979,
Billboard magazine was still referring to it as so-called home piracy. 50
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33
Figure 1. Logo for the anti-taping campaign launched by the British Phonographic
Industry in the 1980s.
In 1984, the US Supreme Court ruled in the landmark Betamax

case51 that home taping of television for personal reasons was fair use
(a legal concept limiting the powers of copyright holders in the interest of
preserving cultural innovation and free speech). This decision was widely
held to apply to a variety of time shifting and librarying behaviors,
including home music taping. Left without legal recourse to prevent
such behaviors, the music industry doubled down on its rhetorical efforts to brand them as piracy. Beginning in the early 1980s, for instance,
the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) initiated its now-iconic Home
Taping Is Killing Music campaign, which featured a skull-like image of
a microcassette tape above a pair of crossbones (fig. 1), even though it
publicly acknowledged that the UK had the lowest piracy rate in the
world.52
By some measures, these rhetorical efforts paid off over the long term.
Although librarying and time shifting have successfully jumped from
analog to digital media and have likely become far more widespread
than they were in the home taping years, the legal status of noncommercial duplication has gotten grayer and grayer, and protection for fair
use has waned and withered.53
A major blow came in the form of the Digital Millennium Copyright
Act (DMCA), a 1998 law that acknowledged fair use but made it a felony
for businesses or consumers to bypass technological copy protection,
even if it was the only way to exercise fair use rights (such as ripping a
song onto a hard drive). Another blow came with the February 2001 fed34
CHAPTER 1
eral appeals court decision in A&M Records v. Napster, Inc.,54 which found
that the popular file sharing service (which operated on a noncommercial
basis) did not enjoy the same fair use protections as Betamax, because
the networks centralized architecture gave its operators the power to
identify and prevent copyright infringement. A third blow was struck by
the 2005 Supreme Court decision in MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd,55
which found that even technology providers who had no knowledge or
power over the use of their products for copyright infringement, and
who did not benefit financially from such infringement, could still be
found liable for inducement.
Mitch Bainwol, the head of the Recording Industry Association of
America (RIAA), celebrated the ruling against Grokster for its role in
contain[ing] piracy and for providing moral and legal clarity.56 Many
legal scholars and public advocates disagreed. As Fred von Lohmann of
the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) argued at the time, the broad
and vague applicability of this new precedent gave rise to a new era
of legal uncertainty,57 in which nearly any media technology could be
construed as a vehicle for piracy.
This is, of course, exactly the outcome devoutly pursued by the music
industry (and its entertainment industry partners). As the law professor
Lawrence Lessig has astutely observed, every new medium is pioneered
by pirates, who use the contents of older media to populate their new
platforms and test their technologies. This was true of the recording
industry (once dubbed pirates by music publishers), the radio industry
(once dubbed pirates by record labels), and also the film and cable television industries.58 In other words, yesterdays pirates have become todays
establishment, and their aim is to stay put by keeping the cycle from repeating. If the price is fair use, free speech, and cultural and technological
innovation, then so be it.
BOTH MUSICAL culture and the music industry are in a state of
flux, and the rapid changes we have witnessed since the turn of the
twenty-first century clearly have something to do with the explosion
of networked digital technologies such as PCs, smartphones, portable
media devices, and the Internet, which binds the rest together. On this
much, nearly everyone can agree.
Where this book differs from the bulk of the commentary and coverage of these changes is in how these disruptions are framed. The recording
industry, which has been highly successful in setting the terms of the public debate thus far, paints a bleak portrait: a venerable industrial sector,
STACKING THE DECK
35
bolstered by centuries of copyright law and responsible for billions of

dollars in economic value, has been ransacked by digital pirates intent on
destruction and the ignorant masses who have fallen under their sway.
We see this story told all the time, in news articles, business reports, and
legal decisions. The only problem is, its not the whole story.
As I have argued in this chapter, music is a fundamental aspect of
human consciousness, akin to language or gesture, and the privatization
of musical expression is a relatively new development in the scope of
social history, motivated primarily by profit seeking and social regulation
rather than cultural innovation and the public interest. And ever since its
inception, the music industry has been in a state of constant flux, seeking
to exploit new technologies, expand its legal scope of powers, and otherwise stack the deck in its own self-interest, with the aim of naturalizing
its unnatural monopoly.
Copyright laws are not handed down by God on stone tablets; they
are written by legislators, who respond to lobbying by corporations and
trade organizations (more on that in chapter 8). In order to justify the
creation and continued expansion of copyright, the music industry has
had to identify a problem that the laws are intended to solve. From the
beginning, this problem has been framed in terms of piracy, although
the exact nature of the purported piratical threat has evolved along with
the technological and legal environment, from the importation of foreign scores to the reproduction of domestic ones to the use of popular
compositions on radio and recordings to the redistribution of popular
recordings, and finally to home taping and online peer-to-peer sharing.
If a pirate in Ciceros day was the enemy of all, a malevolent agent
exploiting the vulnerabilities of the weak and the outer boundaries of
sovereignty in the interest of personal profit, consider who best fits that
description today. Is it one of the tens of thousands of Americans who
have been prosecuted for sharing songs with one another via LimeWire
or BitTorrent? Is it one of the billions of people around the world who
share music, videos, text, and images via YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook? Or is it one of a tiny handful of commercial enterprises that jealously protect their financial interests in our shared culture by maligning,
surveilling, bankrupting, and imprisoning those who are too obstinate to
acquiesce, too poor to fight back, or too weak to resist?
36
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CHAPTER 2
Riding the Tiger

Why the Music Industry Loves (and Hates) Technology
THE MUSIC industry as we know it today began more or less by
accident. When Thomas Edison first developed the technology for sound
recording, it was an unintentional by-product of his attempts to improve
the telephone. Of course, the canny entrepreneur rapidly moved to publicize the invention. In an 1878 article for the North American Review,
he enumerated ten possible uses for his new discovery, with letter dictation at the top of the list (typical of his business-oriented market strategy). Reproduction of music came in only fourth, after the teaching
of elocution.1 Today, all ten of his uses, from audiobooks to voicemail,
are staples of our technological and cultural landscape. But without question, the definitive use of sound recording has been in the field of music
and entertainment. Of the first three major American record labels (all
launched in the 1900s), two of them (Victor and Columbia) still exist
as elements of Sony Music Entertainment, the second-largest of todays
three major labels. The other, Edisons own company, went out of business in 1929.
Similarly, when wireless telephony, or radio sound transmission,
was first developed by Nicola Tesla, Guglielmo Marconi, and others
around the turn of the twentieth century, the medium was initially considered appropriate for person-to-person communications. In the decade
before World War I, hundreds of thousands of independent radio enthusiasts took to the airwaves, using their often self-assembled sets to share
news, gossip, and advice on everything from homework to dating. None
of these enthusiasts were merely transmitters or receivers; they were
each participants in a rapidly growing, technologically enabled community spanning thousands of miles. After the US government temporarily
banned amateur radio during the war, the medium grew into something
37
very different. During the 1920s, the government established the Federal
Radio Commission (later to be supplanted by the Federal Communications Commission), equipment manufacturers started shipping a significant number of radio receivers (for listening only), major broadcast
networks like NBC and CBS emerged, and hundreds of stations across
the country took advantage of federally licensed clear channels, free
of amateur clutter, to broadcast news and music to millions of listeners
across the country. By 1930, the radio industry looked, and sounded,
much as it would at the end of the century, with a handful of major
networks broadcasting music, news, and entertainment to a massive but
largely passive audience.
In short, neither of the technologies that came to define and dominate
the music industry in the twentieth century was initially invented or
conceived for this purpose. Nor was the existing music industry, in the
form of the publisher titans of the nineteenth century, necessarily keen
on these technological innovations. To the contrary, as I alluded to at
the end of the previous chapter, these new distribution channels were
initially considered pirates by the industrys vested interests, for their
disruptive economic potential. Nor were recording and broadcast technologies especially well suited to music distribution, at least in their initial
forms. The high level of noise and single-channel audio provided by wax
cylinders and early AM radio offered a listening experience that todays
musicians and music fans would have little use or patience for. Yet, despite all of these challenges, records and radio grew rapidly in popularity,
performance, and power, generating billions of dollars in market value
and contributing to radical changes in our musical cultures and practices.
As I discuss in this chapter, these developments were neither necessary nor inevitable. Rather, the development of the modern music industry reflects a complex, long-standing love/hate dynamic between the industrys most powerful institutions and the technologies that enable and
constrain them. In science and technology studies (STS), this process is
called the social shaping of technology2a dialectical process of pushand-pull between social dynamics and technological innovation, in a perpetual circuit with neither beginning nor end. Such a dynamic has been
integral to music industry evolution. On the one hand, new technologies
have allowed labels, publishers, broadcasters, and musicians continually
to reinvent themselves and their products and to refine their economic
and aesthetic models. On the other hand, each new technological innovation complicates and challenges established economies and aesthetics,
putting powerful institutions at risk and providing an opportunity for
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upstarts to gain leverage. Consequently, the industry has often treated

technological innovation like the tiger in the Chinese proverb: dangerous
to ride, but more dangerous still to dismount.
Higher Fidelity, Longer Plays: A Brief History of Recording Formats

Have you heard The EDISON PHONOGRAPH play an Amberol
Record? So screams the headline of a full-page ad in a 1909 edition of
Harpers Magazine Advertiser. The rest of the ad copy, short and punchy
for those prolix times, goes on to list the many superior qualities of these
two products, and challenges readers to experience them directly:
You can do this at the store of any Edison dealer. When you go,
note the longer playing time of Amberol Records (playing twice as
long as the standard Edison Records), note the Amberol selections,
not found on any other record of any kind; note also the reproducing point of the Edison Phonograph that never wears out and never
needs changing; the motor, that runs as silently and as evenly as an
electric device, and the special horn, so shaped that it gathers every
note or spoken word and brings it out with startling fidelity.
At the bottom of the advertisement, two drawings are juxtaposed. On

the left, three young women gather around a phonographs horn, clearly
enraptured by the music they are hearing. On the right, his back to the
three ladies, a pianist in formal attire sits at a piano. His right hand is on
his knee, his left hand rests idly on the keys, and he gazes away from
the sheet music, mouth set in a stoic line, eyes fixed on some distant or
imaginary object; he looks like a man considering a new career. Beneath
the drawings is the legend, The Rivals (fig. 2).
This advertisement, quaint and dated as it may seem, contains almost
every element that would come to characterize the music industrys continuing drive to develop and market new recording formats and playback
technologies during the ensuing century. The Amberol is touted for its
longer playing time, and contrasted with earlier formats used by the same
record label, demonstrating a willingness on the part of Edison to cannibalize its existing products in the interest of driving consumers to its newer
ones. The use of format-exclusive content (not found on any other record of any kind) provides further incentive for consumers to upgrade.
The playback equipment is celebrated for its durability and its startling
fidelity. The visual tableaux at the bottom suggest that the sound fidelity
is so great that it rivals the experience of live music (similar to Victors
RIDING THE TIGER
39
Figure 2. Print advertisement for Edison Amberol Records, 1909.
contemporary His Masters Voice trademark, and the Is it live or is

it Memorex? campaign of the 1970s and 1980s). There is also a whiff
of cyborgian sexual innuendo, as the young ladies shun the impotent
virtuoso for their special horn. Finally, there is what advertisers refer
to as the call to action, offering consumers the ability to preview the
technology in a controlled, in-store environment. Each of these factors
remains a vital element in the marketing of music technology to this day.
Even many casual music fans are aware of the progression of dominant
recording formats during the twentieth century.3 Edisons wax cylinders
gave way to shellac 78 rpm (rotations per minute) records in the early
1900s, which were replaced by 45 rpm singles and 33-1/3 rpm longplay or LP vinyl records in the middle of the century. These, in turn,
were supplanted by electromagnetic cassette tapes in the 1980s and then
compact discs in the 1990s. After music fans began using the digital MP3
format to back up and share their music collections around the turn of
the twenty-first century, the recording industry began selling digital
singles in a variety of downloadable formats, which became the dominant sales medium around 2011.
Although this well-worn narrative is technically accurate, the full story
is far more complicated, and interesting. First of all, this teleological tale
of upward progression ignores a great many failed formats that have
fallen by the wayside. From Path discs to 8-track cartridges to DVDAudio discs, the entire history of the recorded music industry is littered
with dozens of once-promising technologies that died without achieving
market dominance (or, in many cases, prevalence or even recognition).
Far from a carefully orchestrated progression from one stable platform
to another, the evolution of recording technology has been a full-scale
battle royal with far more casualties than victors.
Another complicating factor is that neither successful nor failed
media formats ever completely disappear. In the words of the historian
Jonathan Coopersmith, old technologies never die, they just dont get
updated.4 At the time of writing, both vinyl records5 and cassette tapes6
have seen significant recent growth in market popularity, and all three
of the failed formats I mentioned above can still be found for purchase
online (a single eBay search for 8-track returns over 25,000 resultsnot
bad for a second-tier commercial format that hasnt been sold at retail
for three decades).
Another related twist in the format progression story is the question
of what dominant and popular mean in the context of the broader
music marketplace and musical culture. When recording industry
RIDING THE TIGER
41
research data show cassettes outstripping vinyl in 1983 or CDs achieving

market dominance in 1992, they refer to a very specific kind of market
success: namely, the retail purchase of new, pre-recorded, popular music at
major retailers. These data dont claim to offer a comprehensive snapshot
of all of the ways in which musicians and fans use recording technology
but merely all of the uses that generate income for the handful of labels
who dominate the industry and subsidize market data collection.
From the vantage point of musicians, fans, and independent music
sellers, the uses of these technologies are far more varied and persistent.
The official narrative doesnt include the use of prerecorded media created by independent artists and sold directly to consumers in performance venues or via artists websites. Nor does it include the used music
retail market. Nor does it include the significant volume of recording
and librarying that takes place within consumers own homes. Long
after prerecorded cassettes waned as an over-the-counter retail product,
they remained a vital element of mixtape and automotive cultures, partly
because millions of people still carried around Walkmans and drove
cars with cassette decks. I still remember the day in 2002 (a decade after
the CD ascended to market dominance) that I somewhat reluctantly
dropped a cardboard box full of old cassette tapes on the curb outside my
Brooklyn apartment. Within ten minutes, some enterprising music fan or
street vendor had made off with the whole lot. Even today, I still have a
box of cassettes I didnt get rid of, consisting of non-fungible recordings
such as my own bands rehearsals and live recordings, and bootlegs from
my favorite performing artists. I never listen to them, but one of these
days, I tell myself, Ill digitize it all and add it to my personal cloud.
There are many reasons why some recording formats succeed in the
marketplace while others fall by the wayside. Higher fidelity, higher
storage capacity, and other factors noted in the marketing materials for
Edison and his modern descendants certainly account for part of a given
technologys ascendance. But there are other factors that come into play
as well. One of the challenges to format replacement is coordinating the
adoption of the new technology across all major content providers and
manufacturers of media and electronics. Consumers will feel confident
buying a new format only if theyre assured of its longevity and breadth
of adoption, and such confidence can be achieved only if there is significant support throughout the industry. Oftentimes, format wars (such as
the battle between Super-Audio CDs and DVD-Audio at the turn of the
twenty-first century) or other socioeconomic factors (such as the tariffs
levied on manufacturers of digital audio tape [DAT] in the 1990s) will
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slow industry development, and consumers, unsure of which horse to

bet on, will simply walk away from the racetrack.
This paralysis is damaging to the music industry, which has historically relied on the format replacement cycle as an engine of economic
growth. There is a classic scene in the 1997 film Men in Black in which
Tommy Lee Joness character, a veteran agent at a top-secret government agency, shows the younger agent, played by Will Smith, all of the
revolutionary new technologies the agency has access to. At one point,
he picks up a disc the size of a quarter and says, This is gonna replace
CDs soon; guess Ill have to buy The White Album again. The scene
is funny, and widely quoted, because it reflects an economic reality immediately familiar to music buyers; whenever a new format successfully
replaces an older one, a significant number of purchases during its first
decade in the market consists of people replacing the titles they already
own, rather than investing in new music.
The challenges to technological innovation I have discussed thus far
fall on the supply side of the recorded music economy; but in addition
to the internecine battles between labels, electronics manufacturers,
and other industry sectors, there are also challenges on the demand side.
While music fans are certainly receptive to promises of higher fidelity,
enhanced storage capacity, and other benefits such as portability, there
are additional considerations influencing their adoption of new recording formats as well. Most important, there is a vital question regarding
what kinds of social music activities are permittedand proscribedby
the technology in question.
From the music industrys perspective, the ideal consumer would
learn about a new artist or song, purchase a recording, eventually lose
interest in it, and move on to the next purchase. Periodically, a new
format would require that consumers repurchase their existing collections, and repeat the cycle. Selling the record is the last step of the value
chain, and the sole focus of the recording industrys business model. But
to music fans, buying a record is only the starting point of a much richer
and more involved social process. For one thing, we dont tend to listen
to our music singly, and in solitude. One of the main reasons we buy
music is to listen to it with our friends, to share our tastes, and to enliven
our cultural environments. We amass libraries, in part, to exercise our
creative faculties as curators of our personal collections. Sometimes, we
even use the recordings as the basis for more involved acts of creativity,
which I refer to as production-adjacent cultural practices in my book
Mashed Up, such as assembling mixtapes or composing sample-based
RIDING THE TIGER
43
music. To the music industry, these behaviors are not merely threats to
their ability to sell new recordings but also criminal violations of their
copyrights. To music fans, these behaviors are what make records appealing in the first place. And the more that technologies allow us to
collect, share, curate, and reinterpret our music, the more excited we
become as consumers, and the more likely we are to embrace a new
format.
Consequently, there has been a consistent tension within the industry
between the desire to promote formats that have adequate consumer
appeal and the desire to promote formats that will limit consumers
range of freedom in the name of protecting the bottom line. In the era
of vertical integration (a term referring to a single parent company
owning many complementary business units), this tension can even result in conflict within a given corporation. For instance, Sony Electronics,
which pioneered the portable music market with its Walkman product
in the 1980s, began selling portable digital music players in 1999, two
years before Apple introduced the market-transforming iPod. With its
unrivaled branding power, engineering expertise, and knowledge of
the consumer electronics marketplace, Sony should have dominated
this emerging product category long before Apple could make its entry.
Yet, in what has now become a classic cautionary tale taught in business
schools around the world, the company shot itself in the foot. Because
Sony also owned a major record label (worth a small fraction of the
electronics business), the company chose not to allow its digital music
player to support MP3s, for fear that the open format would encourage piracy. Sadly, the device would only play songs encoded in Sonys
proprietary, copy-protected digital format, which could only be obtained
from Sonys music store or created using Sonys specialized software.7
Naturally, music fans showed little interest in the device, and the path
for Apples eventual victory with the MP3-compliant iPod was cleared.
Like the dog in the classic Aesop fable, Sony dropped its prize in its haste
to have another.
To summarize, we can understand the progression of dominant recording formats over the past century as a kind of moving scrimmage
line in a sustained contest between consumers and the record industry,
with consumer electronics manufacturers acting as (not entirely objective) referees. Some formats (such as LPs and CDs) offered higher quality
audio in exchange for limited convenience, while others (such as cassette
tapes and MP3s) sacrificed fidelity for greater portability and writability.
Many of the formats rejected by consumers, such as cassette singles,
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MiniDisc, and slotMusic, are those that failed to provide adequate leaps
in quality to compensate for their diminished utility or vice versa.
Today, we are still in the midst of this process. The rise of MP3 ripping and CD burning at the turn of the century disrupted the traditional
format replacement cycle, in large part because the industry hadnt
prepared adequately for digital business models (a subject I explore in
greater depth in chapter 3). Initially, the industry tried, and failed, to
introduce new formats (such as secure CDs and encrypted digital files)
that sacrificed utility without improving quality. It also attempted to sell
higher-quality audio discs, such as Super Audio CD and DVD-Audio, but
was hamstrung by the format war I mentioned earlier as well as the fact
that, given the CDs claim to perfect digital fidelity in its 1980s market
debut, most music buyers who werent audiophiles failed to recognize
any difference in sound quality.8
Very recently, the industry has put significant weight behind digital
subscription and cloud services, which offer listeners a high degree of
utility and access to an extensive library of music at relatively low cost,
while retaining far more centralized surveillance and control over music
than any previous format. Later in this book, I hazard some observations about the potential for these models to succeed in the marketplace
and about their significance for musical culture and social practices. For
now, I want simply to observe that, innovative as these platforms may
be, they are still subject to the same drivers and constraints as past music
distribution technologies and represent the continuing evolution, rather
than the demise, of the format replacement cycle.
Music in the Air: Radio and the Record Industry

In some ways, the development of radio closely paralleled the evolution of recording formats during the twentieth century: there was a general trend toward greater sound fidelity and utility but also a significant
amount of conflict, compromise, and confusion along the way. The two
industries are deeply interdependent, which furthered the connection in
their development. Radio is a promotional vehicle for recordings, so format innovations such as stereo sound, higher fidelity, and longer playing
time could only be adequately marketed if radio standards and practices
were adapted accordingly. At the same time, radio has always threatened to cannibalize music purchasing; one of the reasons consumers
continued to buy records over the years is because broadcast technology
did not allow them to listen to their choice of music on demand. Radio
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45
developed as what media analysts call a lean back technology for passive consumption, while records were a lean forward technology for
active engagementand this arrangement was not so much an accident
of technology as the outcome of the social shaping of these platforms,
laws, and industries by the various interested parties over the decades.9
As close as they are, the two industries also differ in a few important
respects. First, while the recording industry developed with very little
government oversight, as a classic free market, the evolution of the
radio industry was guided heavily by the FCC and other federal agencies,
and radio was therefore more constrained both in its ability to innovate
and in its capacity for self-destruction.
Second, the record industry is organized around a single economic
transaction, the retail sale of a song or album. Once the music is sold,
labels have little concern with consumers use of their products (as long
as they dont pirate it!). By contrast, the radio industry earns its revenues from advertising, which are tied directly to the measurable audience
for any given station at any given time. Hence there is an immediate correlation between consumers listening habits and the economic success
or failure of the broadcasters. This difference has contributed to some
interesting divergences and tensions between the two industries. For instance, while record labels have historically limited the content of albums
to two or three radio hits, supplemented with an ample amount of
filler (like fast-food burgers), radio playlists (with the exception of specialty formats, such as Album-Oriented Rock) consist almost entirely
of hits. Similarly, while for half a century long-playing vinyl records and
their descendants have enabled popular recording artists to experiment
with more extended compositional and improvisational musical styles,
popular music broadcasters typically remain focused on songs of three
minutes or less, in order to retain audience attention and keep listeners
from turning the dial or, even worse, switching off the radio.
Just as the recording format replacement cycle on examination reveals the complex interplay of forces and stakeholders behind the market
progression from vinyl to cassette to CD and beyond, the evolution of
radio as a platform has not been quite as tidy a process as it may appear
on the surface. Although the medium has been evolving for more than a
century, perhaps the greatest development of the pre-digital age was the
shift from AM (amplitude modulation) to FM (frequency modulation)
as the dominant broadcast standard. At first glance, this change appears
to be an obvious case of the better technology winning out; after all, FM
has a clearer signal, and the ability to carry stereo (or even quadrophonic)
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sound. While its true that AM signals can travel farther at lower expense,
a strong enough FM transmitter can easily blanket an urban market of
millions, and has the added feature of passing through thick walls and
nasty weather. Yet, as was the case with recording format evolution,
the change from AM to FM had at least as much to do with social and
political factors as with technological ones.
It took half a century after FM was first patented by Edwin Armstrong
in 1933 for its share of the radio market finally to eclipse AMs, in the
early 1980s. What accounted for this delay, if the technological benefits
of the newer standard were so obvious? It certainly wasnt for lack of
knowledge or interest within the general public or the industry; as early
as 1944, Billboard Magazine (then titled The Billboard) dedicated significant
coverage to the emergence of FM and to the opportunity FM presents,
and anticipated a boom in what it presciently (or optimistically) referred
to as post-war FM. At the time, the new technology was viewed by
labor organizations and other marginalized voices as a valuable opportunity to provide more mass media representation for groups and interests that had been structurally excluded from AM radio. In the same
issue, however, there were signs of trouble brewing for the new format.
Specifically, the American Federation of Musicians (AFM) decided not
to allow existing radio networks to repurpose musical programming licensed to their AM stations for their new FM affiliates. According to the
article, this decision could be interpreted virtually as an FM nix, due in
part to the perception that there was no financial gain to the networks
in feeding programs to FM.10
Despite the buzz around this new technology, FM radio failed to materialize for decades after World War II. An oft-repeated version of the
story suggests that the large AM networks, content with their business
model and focused on developing television rather than improving radio,
stalled the new formats progress by manipulating the FCC into redistributing the broadcast spectrum at a crucial moment of adoption and
by undermining support among consumer electronics manufacturers.
Armstrongs suicide in 1954, after years of patent disputes and disappointments, provided poignant support for his reputation as a lone innovator
at odds with big business.
While this narrative certainly appears to have some basis in truth, the
media historian Hugh Slotten has shown that the full story of the delay in
FMs adoption involves the complex nature of regulatory decision making, the defining role of different institutions and individuals, the contingencies of historical context, and the essential role of nontechnocratic
RIDING THE TIGER
47
strategies in shaping technological development and cant be reduced to

the inherent technical superiority of such inventions as FM radio [or]
grand conspiracies.11 As the Billboard article about the AFM suggests, for
instance, some stakeholders legitimately questioned FMs financial value
as a music distribution channel, and full-scale acceptance of the format
could only take place once its risk-to-reward ratio could be adequately
agreed on across the entire industry.
When FM finally did begin to gain some market traction, in the 1970s,
the factors driving it were just as complex as those impeding it earlier in
the century. For decades, the FM band had been seen widely as a kind
of highbrow wasteland, the province of classical music and didactic talk
programming, earning jibes from cultural critics such as Woody Allen,
who jokingly laments that he sound[s] just like FM radio in the 1977
film Annie Hall. Yet, a decade later, by the time Allens nostalgic Radio
Days was released in 1987, the industry had so completely adopted the
new format that AM music radio seemed like a relic of the past.
Part of the slow-to-arrive, suddenly transformative success of FM was
due to recent changes in Americas socioeconomic organization and
marketing landscape. With the success of the civil rights and womens
rights movements in the 1960s, advertisers grew interested in developing relationships with the burgeoning ranks of the black and the female
consumer bases. While many AM stations were ossified around oldfashioned formats that segmented audiences on the basis of traditional
demographics, FM stations had the freedom to experiment with newer
lifestyle and genre-driven formats, such as Urban, that aimed for bigger audiences by combining black and white, male and female, and even
members of different generations.
Another important (and related) factor was stylistic change. The radio
entrepreneur and historian B. Eric Rhoads argues that the death of AM
came in 1978 when record promoter Robert Stigwood released the musical film Saturday Night Fever. Rhoads observes that discos sudden explosion into the mainstream that year drove a record number of music listeners to new FM stations such as New Yorks WKTU, which rose from
nowhere to become New Yorks No. 1 station overnight, purely on the
basis of its disco playlist. By the time the dance music sensation imploded
a year or two later, he argues, the damage had been done; listeners had
discovered the FM dial, and many would not return to AM.12
Perhaps the most important factor in the ascendancy of FM was a
larger shift in popular music aesthetics across a range of different styles,
all of them coevolving with innovations in recording technology. The
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development of cheap magnetic tape in the wake of World War II contributed to new multitrack studio techniques such as overdubbing and
phasing, which were first introduced to popular music by experimenters like Les Paul in the 1950s, exploited fully for psychedelic effect by
producers such as George Martin and Brian Wilson in the 1960s, and
became standard practice in many genres by the 1970s. The most significant aesthetic consequence of multitrack studio techniques was, of
course, multichannel sound (mostly stereo) and resulting innovations in
both panning (e.g., location of instruments and voices in the sound field)
and reverberation. However, the improvements in recording quality also
contributed to a renewed emphasis on musical aspects such as dynamics
(the loudness or softness of a given sound) and timbre (the unique voice
of a given instrument or part). These new aesthetic trends made FMs
ability to carry multichannel sound with less noise and richer bass stand
out in stark contrast to AMs tinny mono signal. And as a new generation
of adolescents and young adults, exposed to these innovative aesthetics
via their local FM college radio stations, reached maturity, advertisers
increasingly recognized the need to migrate with them to commercial
FM stations that could adequately accommodate their stylistic tastes.
As with recording formats, then, radio broadcast technology has been
shaped less by a teleological march toward sonic perfection than by a
complex array of competing interests, technological innovations, and
regulatory interventions. The recording industry both loves radio (for
its promotional power) and hates it (for its cannibalizing potential), and
has both impeded and assisted its technological development at different stages and in different ways over the years. And just as in the case
of recording technologies, concerns about granting too much power to
listeners (sometimes framed as piracy) have been a significant factor
throughout the development of this industry. If anything, these concerns
have only increased since the ascendancy of FM, with newer broadcast
platforms such as satellite radio, Internet radio, and digital radio offering new capacitiesand with them, new perceived threats ranging from
stream-ripping, or the unpermitted download of online broadcasts, to
the inclusion of DVR-style personal storage functionality in satellite radio
receivers. As I discuss in chapter 1, home taping of FM radio failed
to kill the music industry as promised (to the contrary, it inaugurated
the greatest rise in music retail sales in history), but that hasnt stopped
the recording industry from using both law and leverage to limit radios
functionality across both analog and digital platforms in the years since
then. More on that later in the book.
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Studio Wizardry and the Pro-Am Gap

Thus far I have discussed the music industrys love/hate relationship
with technology in terms of distribution platforms. Innovations in
broadcast and storage formats are both welcomed and feared for their
disruptive potential, and both processes are driven in part by the pushpull dialectic between industry and consumer power. But there is another important field in which similar dynamics apply: namely, the everevolving world of music production technology.
As I argue in this book and elsewhere, the entire edifice of the recording industry is built on the premise that its value resides in delving into the muck of our shared culture, discovering sonic diamonds in
the rough, then polishing them up and bringing them to market. This
questionable premise is reinforced through television shows like American Idol and The X Factor, through countless boilerplate rags-to-rock puff
pieces in the music press, and through a never-ending stream of selfcongratulatory public relations events and communiqus, culminating
in the annual Grammy awards, watched each year by approximately
forty million simultaneous viewers. But the most powerful symbol of
the music industrys assumed superiority to the broader musical culture
resides within the music itselfspecifically, in the persistent audible gap
between the aesthetics of professional and amateur music production.
In the early years of the industry, the very fact of a sound recordings
existence was enough to establish professional provenance. Unlike radio,
which was fueled in its infancy by so-called amateur users, early recording equipment was expensive and complex enough that only a handful
of professional institutions possessed the resources to generate a salable
volume of recordings. And from the beginning, the circumstances of
studio recording began to alter the aesthetics of popular music, as performers, composers, and producers adapted their arts to the music industrys technosocial requirements, and as the industry self-consciously
privileged and celebrated aesthetic innovations that would emphasize
the superiority of a professionally recorded performance. For example,
the music theorist Mark Katz has extensively chronicled the ways in
which innovative musical aesthetics ranging from classical violin vibrato
to Ellingtonian jazz instrumentation to the crooning style of Frank
Sinatra and Bing Crosby can be understood as phonographic effects,
or the product of the complex relationship of recording technologies,
economics, and cultural forces.13
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Over time, as the cost of recording equipment fell, an increasing number of independent and home studios appeared across the country,
undermining the exceptional role of the major record companies. While
they solidified their economic positions by cartelizing distribution channels to retail stores, they also needed to revamp their aesthetic styles in
order to emphasize the difference in quality between their own products and independently produced music. Thus, a kind of cat-and-mouse
game developed, whereby first, innovations in studio technology would
emerge, often from outside the industry; second, the industry would
adopt and refine these innovations, spending the capital to mainstream
a polished version of the sound; then the cost for independent record
producers to adopt a given innovation would drop to accessible levels,
and it would become ubiquitous; whereby the cycle would repeat itself.
There are countless examples of this process in action, and an entire
book could be written (and should be written) on this subject alone.
For now, a few paragraphs will have to suffice. An interesting case, to
which Ive already alluded, is overdubbing. Before World War II and the
introduction of magnetic tape in the United States, overdubbing was so
difficult and expensive as to be something of a novelty technique. The
multi-instrumentalist Sidney Bechet used overdubbing on a few recordings in 1941, playing six interlocking parts on songs such as The Sheik
of Araby (which took three months to record and edit). The technique
was sufficiently new that Time magazine called it a unique stunt in
its review later that year.14 It was also instantly perceived as a threat to
working musiciansafter all, Bechet hired no sidemen for the recording. Consequently, the AFM (the same group that would nix FM stereo
a few years later) called for a ban on the technique and imposed a fine
on Bechets record label for what it perceived as exploitative labor relations. As he relates in his autobiography, the newspaper men . . . raised
so much hell that the union made the company pay me for seven men,
and it was forbidden to do it again!15
By the end of the decade, the war was over and magnetic tape was
widely available. Experimentalists such as Les Paul in the United States
and Pierre Schaeffer in France began to adapt the technology specifically
for the purposes of multilayered sound composition. Although there were
some early market successes (such as Pauls Lover (When Youre Near
Me)), it wasnt until the 1960s that major labels adopted it as a standard
element in studio recordings. Throughout the next two decades, stereo
multilayered sound became the hallmark of professional recording; it
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51
was one of the sonic factors that would immediately distinguish an independently produced demo from commercial products. By the end of
the 1970s, producers like Donald Fagen and Walter Becker of Steely Dan
had carried the technique to its logical extreme, crafting meticulously
constructed recordings featuring opulently overdubbed instrumentation
and vocalization (such as Michael McDonalds virtuosic background vocals on Peg).
Many musicians and fans at the time balked against this newly elevated aesthetic standard, complaining that Steely Dan and similar bands
were, as many have described them, too perfect.16 Resistant aesthetic
movements such as punk music emerged at exactly this moment as well,
championing a sound that was exuberantly and adamantly imperfect. Yet
many independent musicians still aspired to commercial success, and to
the aesthetics of the major labels. It was to serve these musicians that
consumer electronics manufacturer TASCAM released the Portastudio,
the first low-cost, cassette-based 4-track recording tool, in 1979. Using a
device such as this, musicians without access to professional recording
studios could overdub, multitrack, and emulate the sound of the industry. Naturally, this democratization of the technology undermined its
value as a marker of superiority, and the industry moved quickly on to
other studio technologies to maintain its dominance in this sonic arms
race, using even newer tools such as digital fidelity, sample-based drum
machines, and music sequencers in the 1980s.
This process has repeated, and accelerated, over the years. A recent
example is pitch correction technology such as Auto-Tune, a digital software tool enabling producers to change the pitch of a recording, and
primarily used to fix out-of-tune vocal tracks. When Auto-Tune was
first released in 1997, it was essentially a trade secret, employed like airbrushing (or Photoshop) to cover the sonic blemishes of popular singers.
Soon thereafter, the technology became incorporated more directly into
popular music aesthetics, with inhuman, mechanical leaps between perfect pitches emerging in a range of popular musical styles, from Chers
1998 dance music hit Believe to T-Pains self-produced 2007 R&B hit
Im Sprung. Over the course of the 2000s, the technology appeared in
an increasing number of independently produced recordings, and then
reached ubiquity in 2009 with the debut of YouTube viral video sensation Auto-Tune the News, quickly followed by the release (and market
success) of a mobile application called I Am T-Pain, which enabled any
smartphone owner to auto-tune her own voice in real time, with a price
tag of three dollars.
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Predictably, with the democratization of pitch correction came its devaluation within the industry, and its waning as a mark of professional
distinction. In 2009 the simmering resistance against its cyborgian aesthetic exploded into a full-scale backlash, led by some of the music industrys leading lights. Jay-Zs single D.O.A. (Death of Auto-Tune),
released in the same year, perfectly captured this reactionary sentiment
with lyrics such as This aint for iTunes / this aint for sing-alongs / This
is Sinatra at the opera. In other words, Jay-Z laments the role of pitch
correction in the development of an aesthetic that privileges accessibility
and collaboration (e.g., sing-alongs) and aligns himself with the music of
elitism, virtuosity, and professionalism (e.g., Sinatra, opera).
Although pitch correction continues to be used on many if not most
commercial tracks (including some by Jay-Z!), the backlash continues
especially against independent musicians who employ the software. For
instance, in 2011 a thirteen-year-old girl named Rebecca Black became
the subject of worldwide ridicule and vitriol (and became measurably
the most-hated performer on YouTube) for the crime of releasing an
amateur song and music video called Friday that used pitch correction
technology in a noticeable but un-ironic fashion. One of her most voluble
critics was Miley Cyrus, the teen pop star whose music is probably indistinguishable from Blacks by the majority of Americans over the age of
thirty. Although Cyrus later retracted her critique, the sentiment remains
central to public discussions of the Friday phenomenon: amateurs who
violate the aesthetic boundaries demarcating real musicians from wannabees will be punished and held up for public scorn as examples to the
rest of us.
Paradoxically, one of the unintended consequences of the studio technology arms race has been the gradual weakening of the music industrys
claims to aesthetic exceptionalism. As the onus to produce distinguishably commercial music has shifted farther and farther from musicians to
music producers to technology manufacturers, claims the industry could
once have made no longer ring true. For recording artists, for instance,
a strong singing voice is not as important as it was in the jazz or rock
eras. While its true that Mary J. Blige and Adele have rich, well trained,
powerful voices, the same claim cannot be made for equally successful
singers like Rihanna or Jennifer Lopez, or indeed the majority of vocalists
on the pop charts. Similarly, while A&R (artists & repertoire) executives
at major labels once staked their reputations on their golden ears, or
their ability to hear a diamond in the rough, that work is increasingly
shifting onto computerized music analysis services such as Polyphonic
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53
HMI and Platinum Blue, which use predictive algorithms to pick hits
on behalf of the labels. Research services then cross-index those findings with analyses of online consumer sentiment, leaving little room for
surprise, intuition, or aesthetic innovation. In short, by allowing itself to
become increasingly dependent on studio technology to set itself apart,
the music industry has lost track of its primary source of legitimacy, undermining its already tenuous foundations.
CRITIQUES OF music industry anti-piracy campaigns are often
framed in terms of the industry hating technology or being resistant
to innovation. Yet history shows that technological change has always
been a central facet of the industrys evolution.
From the beginning, the music industry has viewed emerging technology as a double-edged sword, offering the promise of greater power
and the threat of obsolescence in equal measure. The industry has often
branded itself as a champion of both cultural and technological innovation, and has invested heavily in a narrative of perfectible fidelity and
sonic quality in order to migrate consumers to new platforms that either
increase industry power or boost sales and advertising revenues. Yet
there is some truth in critics accusations of music industry Luddism or
obstructionism; innovative technologies like FM stereo have taken half a
century to take root, while other promising developments have withered
on the vine, because of political and economic factors rather than quality
or potential market demand.
In addition to the record companies and broadcasters, several other
stakeholders have played a role in the development of music technology; these include other music industry sectors such as publishers and
musicians, as well as electronics and software manufacturers, government regulators, and consumers themselves. This last group has perhaps
added the greatest amount of complexity to the process; production,
distribution, and broadcast platforms can all be understood as battlefields
on which the competing interests of music buyers and sellers vie for
superiority, and this dialectical tension continues to steer technological
development in unexpected directions.
We cannot understand the industrys reaction to recent innovative
technologies such as peer-to-peer file sharing, the MP3, and the iPod
without taking these historical processes into account. Just as digital
music piracy is a concept that obfuscates the transient and ephemeral
nature of the legal codes and economic systems it ostensibly threatens,
the premise of pirate technology suggests a stable and unchanging
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technological system compromised by a rogue element. As I have argued

in this chapter, nothing could be further from the case. The invention
and adoption of these technologies are part of the same constellation of
competing and collaborating forces that have shaped the evolution of
music industry technology since the days of movable type. As I discuss
in the next chapter, the industrys combative stance in the face of these
innovations was a conscious choice among several possible strategies,
rather than the only logical response to an inevitable threat.
RIDING THE TIGER
55
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The Piracy Crusade!
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CHAPTER 3
Weve Been Talking about

This for Years
The Music Industrys Five Stages of Grief
ONE OF THE most enduring myths about the digital music revolution1 concerns the level of technological cluelessness and absence of
foresight within the music industry at the close of the twentieth century.
Whether you see them as victims or villains, canaries in the coal mine
or endangered dinosaurs, you probably believe that the major record
labels were taken unawares by the new centurys innovations, and that
the unforeseeable consequences of digital sharing are at the root of any
problems the industry faces today.
If so, youre in good company. Most journalists, academics, and other
chroniclers of the Internet age have repeated this myth so frequently
over the past fifteen years that its considered common knowledge. The
industry was unprepared2 and surprised3 by MP3 and peer-to-peer
file sharing technology, even blindsided4 by it (a term I myself have
invoked in a previous publication).5 This myth functions primarily to
generate sympathy and support for the decisions the major labels and
other institutions have made in the wake of these innovations; after all,
we may reason, they did the best they could on short notice under difficult and unprecedented circumstances. Had they seen the potentially
transformative effects of digital technologies on the horizon, they could
have made adequate preparations, and spared themselves and us a lot
of trouble.
The problem is, this myth has very little basis in fact. In reality, the record industry knew better than anyone what the potential effects of digital and networked technologies would be, and still failed to act in a proactive and responsible manner. RIAA head Hilary Rosen acknowledged
56
this much as early as 1999, a few months after the launch of Napster
and subsequent to the record labels defeat in a suit against the MP3 device manufacturer Diamond Multimedia. In Rosens words, Its not like
MP3s caught us by surprise or anything. Weve been talking about this
for more than 10 years.6 Even in retrospect, record industry executives
have conceded that they suffered not from a lack of foresight but rather
from a lack of vision. As Doug Morris, then the CEO of Universal Music
Group, told Wired magazine in 2007, theres a misconception writers
make all the time, that the record industry missed this. They didnt. They
just didnt know what to do.7
Yet, if Morriss account is descriptively accurate, it doesnt provide
much in the way of analytical self-reflection. Why did the industry fail to
act proactively on its market intelligence? Was is simply, as Morris suggested in his Wired interview, that theres no one in the record company
thats a technologist and we didnt know who to hire?8 This seems
unlikely. First of all, as I argue in chapter 2, technological innovation was
hardly an unfamiliar force within the music industry; to the contrary, it
is a constitutive element of the business, and music distribution technology has always been in flux. Second, it is a matter of public record (and a
fact to which I can personally attest, having known them) that the major
labels employed a number of celebrated technologists and tech strategists
during this period, including inventors and innovators such as Albhy
Galuten, Ted Cohen, and Larry Kenswil.
If we rule out ignorance and inexperience, then, a far more likely explanation of the music industrys failure to meet the challenges of digital
media head on can be found in its institutional culture and practices, or
what we might metaphorically understand as the psychology of the
companies involved. The law professor Michael Carrier insightfully describes these challenges in terms of an innovators dilemma, in which
legacy industries have little short-term incentive or ability to innovate,
even if the long-term circumstances demand it.9 In public discussions
of these matters, Ive often made a similar argument using the framework of Elisabeth Kbler-Rosss famous five stages of grief,10 which
describes the process whereby grieving individuals deal with death and
other forms of radical change. This is not a flippant comparison; having
advised, researched, and reported on the music industry as an analyst,
journalist, and academic between 1997 and the present day, I believe
that it was precisely the sheer scope of potential market transformation
implied by digital and networked technologies that provoked the music
industrys strategic paralysis.11
WEVE BEEN TALKING ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS
57
Denial and Isolation: CDs Original Sin and the Rise of MP3
According to Kbler-Ross, the first stage of grief is denial, which can
be followed or accompanied by an increasing sense of isolation from
ones peers or surroundings. One could argue that the recording industry was in denial about the potentially transformative capacity of digital
technologies from the very moment it introduced the compact disc as a
new commercial music distribution format in 1982. This format, which
was thoroughly vetted by all of the major labels and successfully won
out over several competing digital prototypes,12 was endowed with a
kind of technological original sinnamely, that its digital information
was unsecured by encryption or other means and therefore available to
be copied freely by anyone using a computer equipped with an optical
media drive, then copied and redistributed ad infinitum without any loss
of quality.
Although we may think of CD ripping and burning as a uniquely
twenty-first-century development, the plans to use compact discs for data
storage and transmission were already in the works when music CDs
were first introduced into the marketplace, and the first CD-ROM drives
were available to consumers as early as 1985. Both music CDs and CDROMs reached market maturity in the 1990s, and by the time the CD had
ascended as the dominant music format, pioneering CD-ROM publishers
such as the Voyager Company were shipping millions of titles per year.
Thus, while not every record label executive in the early 1980s necessarily had the expertise and the foresight to realize that the CD format
betokened the end of their cartels control over music distribution, it was
hardly beyond consideration for their in-house technologists even in the
earliest years, and would have been increasingly obvious to all interested
parties well before the market transition from cassette to CD was complete. So why wasnt this new format aborted before it achieved ubiquity?
Because, as I discuss further in chapter 5, CDs also yielded an unprecedented amount of revenue for the music industry and inaugurated the
longest and steepest rise in total market value in the industrys centurylong history. With an upside that large, why worry about the downside?
The industry exhibited a similar degree of willful blindness when it
came to the potential market impact of digital distribution formats and
the Internet. As the music industry journalist Steve Knopper relates in
his excellent book Appetite for Self-Destruction, Fraunhofer, the developer
of MP3 technology, tried to warn the industry in the early 1990s of the
potentially volatile combination of unsecured CDs and its new encoding
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format, but didnt get anywhere. There was not that much interest at
the time, Knopper writes, quoting a Fraunhofer employee.13
As the 1990s wore on, CD-ROM drives became ubiquitous, and MP3
became an increasingly popular format on the Internet. Yet the industry
appeared ever more isolated from its own artists and customers, continuing to operate its still-thriving CD business as though nothing much had
changed. By the end of the decade, many industry analysts including me
were clamoring publicly for the industry to embrace new technologies
and distribution models, and proactively to release music in online digital formats before control over distribution eluded its grasp completely.
Even the popular and trade press caught on and took the record labels
to task for their inaction. As the PC Magazine columnist John C. Dvorak
lamented in 1997, While the music industry moans and groans, it obviously isnt doing the job needed. . . . This concept is not going to disappear, and the record companies should look at this as a new form of
distribution.14
To be fair, many in the music industry paid lip service to what was
then known as digital distribution in the mid-to-late 1990s. At virtually
every meeting or conference I attended in the presence of record executives from 1997 to 1999, I was assured that a decisive digital music strategy was right around the corner, and that the industry was excited about
the possibilities presented by new technologies. As Cary Sherman, then a
senior executive vice president at the RIAA, told Business Week magazine
in 1998, We think digital distribution and the Net provide great opportunities, and we love that.15 Yet very little in the way of actual digital
music distribution materialized, and for online music fans, pirate tracks
distributed on MP3-hosting websites were the only downloadable source
of commercial music during these years.
The hemming and hawing, promises and procrastinations continued
until the sudden rise of Napster in the summer of 1999, when the online
explosion of MP3 content fueled by peer-to-peer file sharing would force
the major labels to acknowledge that digital distribution had arrived
without them. Yet even this sudden confrontation with reality would
not be enough to bring the industry to its senses and encourage it to
embrace a viable digital distribution strategy.
Anger: Lawsuits, Threats, and Propaganda

According to Kbler-Ross, the second stage of grief is characterized
by anger, which in the case of medical patients can be displaced in all
59
directions and projected onto the environment at times almost at random.16 This has been true in the case of the music industry as well,
which responded to the popular emergence of digital music with a wide
array of threats, accusations, and lawsuits aimed at virtually everyone
involved in any way. Of course, neither threats nor lawsuits are new to
the music business; in a way, they are the industrys lingua franca and
modus operandi. But both the volume and the range of targets significantly expanded in the digital era, especially in contrast to the period of
relative peace and plenty during the previous two decades.
The first digital music lawsuits took place in June 1997, when the
RIAA and its constituents sued three noncommercial Internet music
archive sites, which allegedly hosted MP3s of music controlled by the
major labels, available for free download. Even though all three websites
were shut down by their publishers once legal action was taken, and the
degree of market harm and potential amount of damages to be recovered
were insignificant, the plaintiffs in the case acknowledged that the point
was, as RIAA chief Hilary Rosen told a reporter at the time, to obtain
a court decision affirming the rights of copyright owners.17 In other
words, the aim was to set a precedent, and to send a warning.
This was the first drop in what would soon become a deluge of litigation against any Internet sites and services hosting or facilitating access
to major label content, including high-profile lawsuits against innovators
like Napster, the music locker service MP3.com, and the Internet radio
pioneer LAUNCH Media, as well as countless other, less celebrated,
defendants. In the meantime, a 1998 revision to copyright law called
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) gave record labels and
music publishers the power to issue takedown notices to any site or
service they believed were violating their copyrights. As the law scholars
Jennifer Urban and Laura Quilter have demonstrated, these takedown
notices, which require no evidence or judicial oversight and entail a difficult appeals process, are routinely abused by copyright holders to create
leverage in a competitive marketplace, to protect rights not given by
copyright . . . and to stifle criticism, while failing to adequately protect
copyright in many legitimate cases.18
Wielding the DMCA in one hand and the threat of costly litigation in
the other, the music industry effectively shut down hundreds or perhaps
thousands19 of independent web publishers, software developers, and
service providers in the early years of the new century. There is little
question that many of these sites and services were providing their users
with major label music, or the means to access it, without a license. But
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they were also doing the socially and economically valuable work of exploring the capacities of emerging technologies, pioneering new business
models, and developing the rudiments of twenty-first-century musical
culture. A great many of them even sought licenses from the labels and
publishers but were either rebuffed or offered rates that quickly would
have put them out of business (more on this in chapter 7). To contemporary observers, the music industrys strategy was clear. As the Los Angeles
Times (normally a great sympathizer with the content industrys perspective) described the scenario in a 2001 article, the barrage of lawsuits by
record labels had hampered the Web-based companies innovation and
growth.20
The music industrys legal assault wasnt limited to online sites and services; it also attempted to shut down or intimidate consumer electronics
manufacturers and consumers themselves. As I mentioned above, the industry attempted to stem digital music usage by suing the manufacturer
of the first portable MP3 player, Diamond Multimedia. But unlike most
of the industrys claims against content and service companies, this lawsuit was unsuccessful, and the decision established a legal precedent that
copying music from a hard drive to a portable device constituted a personal use, and was not a right the music industry had the power to grant
or withhold.21 Notwithstanding this ruling (or perhaps in response to it),
the Disney Corporations CEO Michael Eisner testified before Congress
in 2002, arguing that the Rip. Mix. Burn. advertising campaign behind
Apples first-generation iPod was tantamount to telling consumers that
they can create a theft if they buy this computer.22 Eisners aim in this
case was to convince Congress to pass new legislation undermining the
Diamond precedent, requiring all consumer electronics and computer
manufacturers to integrate copy protection into their devices, thereby
preventing any unsanctioned uses of any music or video whatsoever
(including, presumably, legally established fair uses such as backing
up music collections or making mixtapes for personal consumption).
Although the industry was unsuccessful in this particular campaign, its
fantasy of total control over the distribution and use of all content has
persisted over the past decade and has led to some highly problematic
developments, as I discuss throughout this book.
Of course, the music industry hasnt limited the targets of its litigation
to other businesses. In a 1999 interview, Hilary Rosen pledged not to sue
individual music downloaders, arguing that it doesnt seem practical.
Its virtually impossible to do. . . . Besides, I have very strong views about
privacy, so Im not going to start doing it.23 Despite these very good
61
reasons, the RIAA began suing alleged music downloaders less than four
years later, shortly after Rosen stepped down and ceded the reins to the
veteran political operative Mitch Bainwol. The lawsuits, which targeted
at least thirty-five thousand Americans, including a significant number
of children, elderly, disabled, and deceased people, continued at least
until the end of 2008, when the RIAA announced it would discontinue
the strategy (although there is evidence that it continued the practice at
least through 2010).24
These lawsuits alone suggest that the music industry views its customer base with a degree of suspicion bordering on contempt. Yet when
viewed in combination with industry rhetoric claiming its own mission
as analogous to the civil rights movement25 and comparing unlicensed
digital music users to shoplifters,26 drug dealers, and terrorists27 (no mere
idle rhetoric, considering that the film industry and the FBI invoked the
Patriot Act to pursue a fan of the TV show Stargate SG-1 for allegedly
infringing copyrights on his website),28 a larger narrative emerges. The
music industry, in its anger, has apparently cast itself as the hero in a
tragedy of epic proportions. Like Michael Caine in the film Zulu, the industry believes itself to be the last bastion of civilization, outnumbered
in a wilderness redoubt by a malevolent horde and firing endless volleys
into the throng in a last-ditch effort to preserve itself. Of course, like the
actual Zulu warriors of the nineteenth century, many of us cast in the
role of savages are more likely to see ourselves as the protagonists,
defending our ancestral homeland and our culture from our would-be
colonial overlords.
Bargaining: The Myth of Secure Distribution

The third stage of grief, according to Kbler-Ross, is bargaining, which,
she argues, is really an attempt to postpone the inevitable.29 Following its long period of denial and its initial outburst of litigious anger, the
music industry plunged headlong into the process of trying to negotiate
a halt, or at least a deceleration, of the changes brought about by digital
music technologies. It pursued this goal on a number of fronts, including bargaining with consumers about what they could and couldnt do
with their music using digital rights management (DRM) technology,
and bargaining with music sellers to reaffirm the dominance of the traditional wholesale/retail economic model. While these tactics did little to
halt the advance of new digital music behaviors and technologies, they
certainly slowed down the economic development of digital music as an
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industry and, by extension, undermined the financial well-being of the

traditional music industry during a pivotal moment of transition.
Digital rights management, a technology that creates a kind of digital
padlock around a file such as a song, movie, or game, seemed to many
rights holders like a promising technology in the webs early years. As I
myself proposed in a syndicated report I wrote as an analyst for Jupiter
Research in 1999, DRM is absolutely integral to protecting copyrights
online. . . . The only way to track and prevent misuse of online intellectual property is through a proactive solution that includes both watermarking and secure distribution technology.30 Although I tempered this
message with the cautionary addendum that such a strategy would only
work if the technology were also used to improve the consumer experience and develop new business models that moved beyond retail transactions, the overall vision was flawed. This is because it was based on the
erroneous belief that control over online content distribution was still a
viable option for the media industry.
The same month in which my DRM report was published, a college student named Shawn Fanning launched a new peer-to-peer (P2P)
file sharing service called Napster, and within weeks it had spread like
wildfire. By the end of the year, millions of people were swapping their
entire MP3 libraries, making hundreds of millions of files available to
one another. Previous industry estimates had placed the total number of
MP3s on the web at somewhere near half a million, so this was an explosion in the range of three orders of magnitude. I quickly realized that my
vision had been wrong and started to advocate for post-Napster product
formats31 that acknowledged the inevitability of free distribution and
attempted to improve upon, rather than control, the P2P experience.
Unfortunately, my clientele in the recording industry were more receptive to the earlier vision, and spent most of the next decade using DRM
and other forms of secure distribution technology on virtually every
song, album, and video they released, to disastrous effect.
The primary problem with DRM, of course, is that it doesnt work.
Even if a million copies of a song are all locked down, preventing unlicensed users from listening to or sharing it, a single unfettered copy
(such as one ripped from a CD) can be reproduced ad infinitum online.
But its strategic problems run even deeper than this. For one thing, the
restraints on fair use presented by DRM undermine consumer trust
and patienceto say nothing of musical cultureand make unlicensed
music from P2P networks or elsewhere seem even better by comparison.
For another thing, DRM is prone to technical malfunction and tends
63
to be used heavy-handedly, with content owners erring on the side of

overprotection; even ostensibly permitted uses are often difficult for consumers to accomplish, and there is a frustrating propensity for server
error messages.
In practice, DRM also presented many unforeseen strategic difficulties
for retailers and forced them to violate their customers trust even further. For instance, when high-profile digital music sellers such as Yahoo!
and MSN decided to shut down their stores for financial reasons, they
were forced to choose between maintaining their DRM servers indefinitely and at significant cost (which would allow consumers to continue
listening to the songs theyd purchased), and shutting them down (which
would cause all the music theyd sold over the years to become nonfunctional). In both cases, the companies chose the latter course, and
consumers and artists lost out, with a significant blow to goodwill for
both the retailers and the record labels. The opening sentence of a 2008
Wired article on the Yahoo! shutdown put it succinctly: If you bought
DRMed, copy-protected music, you are an idiot.32
As a final indignity, DRM actually ended up undermining the market
power of the labels that used it, by increasing the leverage enjoyed by
Apple, which used the technology to erect a walled garden around
its iPod hardware, its iTunes software, and its digital music retail business, excluding third party retailers and manufacturers from the process
and creating a near-monopoly. The industry, as it turns out, was stuck
within a walled garden of its own. Once it had committed to DRM, it
became increasingly difficult to disentangle its business model from the
technology.
This was exacerbated by another, related form of bargaining on the
part of the labels. If DRM functioned as a cybernetic straitjacket to lock
consumers into an obsolete, pre-digital mode of consumption, it also
helped to bolster the industrys obsolete, pre-digital economic models.
Since the days of Edisons wax cylinders, record labels had made their
money as a wholesale business, shipping products to retailers, who then
marked them up and sold them to consumers. According to classical
economics, this model is premised on a scarce, physically distributed
commodity; each individual unit that is shipped and sold has a price
determined by the intersection of supply and demand, and profitability is
based on the ability of each party to eke out a margin on a per-unit basis.
Clearly, in the case of digital goods, which can be reproduced infinitely
at any stage in the value chain at little or no incremental cost, the markup
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pricing model makes no sense for buyers, sellers, or content providers.

Record labels can forego expensive manufacturing and distribution costs
and focus their energies on developing and marketing music, while retailers, flush with an unlimited supply of product, can experiment with
a wide range of price points and product formats, finding sweet spots
that bring in the greatest consumer expenditures at the lowest cost of
goods. Together, they can share in the benefits that accrue, while consumers can gain access to a higher volume and broader range of music
at the same level of expenditure. Its a potential win-win-win situation.
Yet, for a variety of reasons ranging from cautious skepticism to willful
ignorance to entrenched power relations, the music industry failed to
embrace this new set of opportunities, opting instead to artificially prolong the life of the traditional music wholesale model by using copyright
(in lieu of physical control over distribution) as a mode of enforcement.
Nearly every digital music store (including some operated by the
major labels themselves) crashed and burned under this model, hampering the growth of the digital music industry and undermining sales
overall. While its true that the exception, Apple, sold billions of dollars
worth of digital singles, it is also widely acknowledged that the company has done so by selling music at zero profit margin, recognizing its
upside from the sale of iPods and other high-cost devices whose value
to consumers is increased by the availability of the digital music in the
iTunes store. This, in turn, has exerted downward pressure on the ability
of rival music sellers to sell at a higher rate, reducing the overall value of
the industry and undermining competition across the board.
In 2007 (as the major labels began to discontinue the use of DRM
for digital downloads) Edgar Bronfman Jr., then CEO of Warner Music
Group, conceded during a speech at a business conference that the
industrys attempts to stall digital music through these methods of bargaining had failed, and even backfired. In his own words:
We used to fool ourselves. . . . We used to think our content was
perfect just exactly as it was. We expected our business would remain blissfully unaffected even as the world of interactivity, constant
connection and file sharing was exploding. And of course we were
wrong. How were we wrong? By standing still or moving at a glacial
pace, we inadvertently went to war with consumers by denying them
what they wanted and could otherwise find and as a result of course,
consumers won.33
65
Depression and Acceptance: Moving beyond the CD

The final stages of grief, Kbler-Ross tells us, are depression and acceptance. During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the music industry faced depression in both senses of the word. Economically, the
traditional music retail market imploded; global music sales plummeted
from roughly $44 billion in 2000 to $28 billion in 2011.34 Although this
is certainly a precipitous drop, the economic impact wasnt quite as dire
as it may appear at first glance. As I discuss in greater detail in chapter
5, the losses were, to an extent, both foreseeable and preventable, and
they were also offset by a number of economic gains not reflected in
these figures. Yet there is little question that the market data reveal a
profound transition in music industry economics, with fundamentally
destabilizing effects that worked to the benefit of some and to the detriment of others.
Emotionally and culturally, it was a decade of depression as well.
There was a growing sense of unease and frustration among many
throughout the industry, from recording artists to executives to support
staff. For some, it was merely a sense of impending doom associated with
the bad market data and waves of layoffs. Yet there was also a pervasive
sense, especially among some of the most successful artists and highly
placed executives, that the music industry was either hopelessly obstinate or otherwise incapable of adapting to the new reality of empowered
consumers and digital distribution networks. In public, most hewed to
the RIAA narrative, excoriating digital upstarts and their user bases for
destroying a venerable industry. But privately, many expressed bafflement or outrage at the slow pace of change within their own organizations and among their partners. Anyone who worked in or around the
music industry during these years can attest to this.
I cant share the sources or contents of my private communications
with executives and artists critical of their own organizations (beyond the
interviews in chapter 7), but the corollary of these opinions can be seen
in the exodus of some of the industrys most visionary thinkers and most
powerful businesspeople from the major labels. The list is far too long
to publish in full, but some notable examples include executives such as
Michael Nash (former head of digital strategy for Warner Music Group),
Cory Ondrejka (former head of digital strategy for EMI; he returned to
his tech origins by working for Facebook), Larry Kenswil (former head of
digital strategy for Universal Music Group, now an attorney), and Strauss
Zelnick (former CEO of BMG Entertainment; he left the music industry
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to run Take-Two, a video game publisher), as well as recording artists

such as Radiohead, Prince, Nine Inch Nails,35 Ok Go, and Madonna,36 all
of whom abandoned their major label contracts in the midst of thriving
careers.
When I first started using Kbler-Rosss framework as an explanatory
metaphor for the music industrys self-immolation in 2006, there was
scant evidence of the fifth phase, acceptance. At the time, I cited a promising (if poorly named) initiative called SpiralFrog, the first digital music
service to offer licensed major label downloads for free in an advertisingsupported environment,37 as well as highly publicized plans for Warner
Music Group to launch an e-label for online-only music distribution,
granting artists control over their own copyrights.38 Although the major
labels were still primarily dependent on the CD format and deep in the
grip of DRM, it appeared they were at least willing to consider a way
forward.
In the years since then, the music industry has taken major strides to
move beyond its twentieth-century business models and technologies.
Depression has abated somewhat and acceptance has been on the rise.
Starting in 2007, the major labels allowed iTunes and other retailers to
begin selling digital downloads without DRM. The recording industry
appears largely to have stopped suing customers in 2008. Labels and publishers have granted licenses to some high-profile digital music sellers employing novel, twenty-first-century business models, including cloud
music services such as Apples iCloud and freemium mobile subscription providers like Spotify. And there have even been some mea culpas
from senior music industry executives, like Edgar Bronfman Jr.s quoted
above and the acknowledgment by Geoff Taylor (CEO of the British collection society BPI) that I, for one, regret that we werent faster in figuring out how to create a sustainable model for music on the internet.39
The music economy seems to be responding to these changes; in 2011,
the RIAA reported that music retail sales revenue had climbed for the
first time in seven years, driven primarily by digital music.40
Yet for all the indications that the music industry is beginning to work
through its challenges and biases, in many ways it is still mired in the
legal, economic, and ideological detritus of the past. Rather than ceding
copyright to creators, the labels have been fighting tooth and nail to
prevent their artists from regaining control over their own work per
the reversion clause of the 1976 Copyright Act,41 while insisting that
newly signed artists agree to 360 deals that grant labels a much broader
ownership stake over an artists work and life than traditional contracts
67
did.42 And despite their refreshing willingness to grant licenses to innovators like Spotify, the labels are still essentially requiring that licensees pay
them on a per use basis, rather than collecting a share of revenues, a
condition that structurally excludes smaller and more innovative companies from competing with the well-funded Apples and Googles of the
world, and makes it difficult for any music seller, no matter how large,
to recognize a profit.
Underpinning all of these decisions is the recording industrys continuing commitment to a narrative in which it plays the role of victim
and the Internets billions of users are painted as aggressors or, at best,
suspects. In the name of this narrative, which routinely invokes Napster
as the ground zero in this imagined assault, the industry has pushed, and
continues to push, for the enactment of laws and treaties that would
effectively subject people around the world to a degree of digital surveillance and censorship that has no precedent in free society.
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The Piracy Crusade!
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PA R T I I
Who Really Killed the

Music Industry?
IN AGATHA CHRISTIES classic detective novel The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the titular character is killed, and
nearly everyone he knew immediately becomes a suspect,
from the obligatory butler to members of the victims
own family. At the end of the book, it turns out (spoiler
alert) that the narrator himself, who is assisting detective
Hercule Poirot in his investigations, is to blame for the
heinous deed. In his Apologia, the murderer even confesses to being rather pleased with myself as a writer, for
having told the story in a way that obscured his own guilt,
thereby shifting the readers focus to the other, innocent
suspects.
In the narrative of the music industrys decline since the
turn of the century, a very similar dynamic is at work. This
narrative, which has been constructed and promoted aggressively by the music industry itself, positions the steep
drop in music retail sales revenue as a kind of industrial
murder, and fingers nearly everyone for the blame, from
digital music startups to major companies like Google and
Apple to the hundreds of millions of people who use their
products. P2P file sharing even plays the role of the butler,
as the inevitable primary suspect. In truth (spoiler alert),
it is the music industry itself that deserves the bulk of the
69
blame for its own misfortunes, a fact it has tried its best to
obscure by carefully curating the narrative to emphasize
some details while obscuring others.
My aim in this section is to debunk the music industrys
version of events and offer a more thorough counternarrative that fully explores the industrys own role in the
process, while exonerating those parties who have been
wrongfully accused. I begin with the butler, examining
the pros and cons of P2P and showing that it cant reasonably be blamed for the majority of the music market
contraction. I then move on to examine the many economic factors that contributed to the boom in music sales
revenue during the 1990s and the bust in the following
decade, and describe the music industrys decisions that
contributed to both boom and bust. Finally, I review some
of the ways in which the industrys own methods of doing
business with partners, musicians, and consumers has
eroded its goodwill, further undermining its market value
and revenue potential.
70
WHO REALLY KILLED THE MUSIC INDUSTRY?
CHAPTER 4
Dissecting the Bogeyman

How Bad Is P2P, Anyway?
SO-CALLED DIGITAL music piracy comes in many flavors. The
music industrys earliest online targets for litigation, in the mid to late
1990s, were MP3-sharing websites, simple platforms that enabled user X
to upload a song to a web server, and user Y to download it. As Internet
technology has exploded over the past decade and a half, fueled by at
least three waves of investment frenzy, surging global demand, and the
unrelenting pace of Moores law,1 enterprising developers have conceived of countless new variations on this theme.
Why is music sharing such a popular application for computer programmers to develop? Since the first MP3 was posted to the web, the
challenge of sharing and obtaining digital music has been, as coders
would say, trivial. Yet it remains one of the most popular functions
of new programs by independent developers, startups, and big software
firms alike. The universal popularity of music itself is partially responsible for this trend. As I discuss in chapter 1, music is an integral element of human culture and consciousness, and therefore it should not
be surprising that we seek it out in every medium we develop. Musics
ubiquity and universality also make it an ideal test case for software developers to try out new ideas. Its easy to find content, easy to build a
user base, easy to manipulate relatively small files like MP3s, and easy to
find existing code libraries, APIs (application programming interfaces),
SDKs (software development kits), and other building blocks for new
software projects.
Yet the allure of music sharing applications can likely be attributed to
more than the appeal of the content or the ease of production. Just as
computer hackers are engaged in what the infamous hacker-consultant
Kevin Mitnick calls a constant cat-and-mouse game2 with their intended
71
targets and cybersecurity forces, music software developers and their

users are always looking for ways around the legal, technological, and
social roadblocks that the music industry erects in cyberspace. Whether
its creating a method of sharing that falls on the legal side of the latest
court decision or a method of decryption that cracks the latest form of
DRM, the fundamental psychosocial pull of music, combined with the
unique thrill of resisting the imposition of authority, has helped to generate a hothouse environment in which music software innovation has
flourished. In other words, the industrys own efforts at cracking down
on unlicensed music distribution have been a crucial element in driving
both software developers and music fans to explore newer and more
esoteric methods of sharing.
This activity hasnt stopped the music industry from trying, however,
nor discouraged it from branding an ever-wider range of activities and
technologies as piracy. Yet the poster child for the industrys economic
and strategic woes continues to be its bte noire, peer-to-peer file sharing. Even in 2012, more than a decade after the service was shut down
and then sold to Bertelsmann, which at the time owned the major label
BMG, RIAA chief Cary Sherman published a blistering op-ed in the New
York Times, tracing the origin of his industrys malaise to the 1999 launch
of Napster.3 Dubious though this claim is, it remains a vital element in
the music industrys narrative of its own decline, which in turn is foundational to the industrys calls for more sweeping copyright powers, as
well as enhanced surveillance and censorship of digital communications
platforms.
Yet the case against P2P and online music sharing in general, like many
of the music industrys claims, is not nearly so damning as it may appear
on the surface. It is manifestly true that for some sharers, under some
circumstances, P2P is used as a replacement for legal music sales and
therefore has a negative economic impact on record labels, publishers,
and some recording artists and composers. More broadly speaking, P2P
has also been one of several factors that have undermined the market
value of traditional music distribution formats such as CDs, by rendering
the social practices, modes of listening, and economic models inherent
to these older technologies obsolete. But, as it turns out, music sharing has had beneficial effects as well, both economically and socially.
For some P2P users, it provides the opportunity to sample music freely
before spending money on it. For businesses, it provides a valuable channel for marketing and research. Socially, it provided the first broadly
accessible platform for people to gain access to a significant volume of
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music beyond their comfort zones, contributing to a more sophisticated musical culture that transcends the generic boundaries imposed
by the economics of mass production and mass media. And for a great
many musicians and composers, it has provided a powerful platform for
self-promotion and independent distribution that has allowed them to
catapult into broader awareness and to take a more active role in their
own careers than they would have had in the twentieth-century music
industry.
Given the range of factors at work, it would be impossible to judge
P2P and online music sharing as net positive or a net negative for the
music industry or musical culture overall. Any claims in either direction
are likely to be so limited in scope as to be irrelevant, or so biased as to
be disinformative. Yet it is possible to take a close look at the technologys
many pros and cons, and in so doing, to understand better its uses and
threats to specific parties under specific conditions.
How Does P2P Work?

Before exploring the social and economic ramifications of peer-to-peer
file sharing, it would be helpful to review some of the key concepts and
components of this platform. There is no single technology, protocol, or
architecture underpinning P2P, nor is there even a clear boundary separating P2P from other forms of online information-sharing. Although
it typically gets represented as a kind of digital black market, a shady
back alley where contraband and counterfeits flourish free from the
prying eyes of the authorities, this representation is wrong on at least
two important counts. First, P2P isnt a place any more than e-mail
or instant messaging is a place. It is simply a collection of diverse and
often competing technologies, any of which may enable two or more
users (or peers) to share digital information, encoded in a file of any
kind. Like e-mail, this platform may be accessed via a web site or via a
stand-alone application, yet it is independent of these avenues of entry.
In the parlance of computer developers, these websites and applications
are front-ends, and the P2P protocol or network in question is the
back-end.
Second, there is nothing necessarily shady or illicit about the material
being shared on these networksat least, no more than is the case for
any other communication network, such as e-mail, telephone, or the US
mail. And, though some P2P networks are closed, requiring invitations or other credentials for participationa safeguard typically used
DISSECTING THE BOGEYMAN
73
for quality control as well as privacythe vast majority of file sharing

takes place on open networks, which are as accessible and subject to
surveillance as the web, and far more transparent than e-mail or instant
messaging.
Not only are there dozens of rival back-end technology platforms for
P2P file sharing and hundreds of front-ends via which to access them,
there is also a wide range of different architectures for the networks
themselves.4 Some platforms, such as the original Napster, are centralized, meaning that all the information about who is searching for what
travels through a single server, which has a kind of gods-eye-view on
the activities of each peer. Other networks, such as Gnutella, are unstructured; there is no center to the network, and each peer has only a
limited view of the network based on information from the other peers
to which it is randomly connected. While Napster and Gnutella facilitate
the exchange of complete files, such as MP3s, between any two given
peers, BitTorrent (currently the most popular P2P protocol) breaks
down files into their component bits, and requires that users go through
a somewhat complex process to collect and reassemble those bits into a
complete file. A peer enters the network by opening a torrenta small
text document containing information about the file in question, generally hosted on a website and discoverable through a specialized search
engine called an index. The torrent then directs the users software to
a tracker, which is a database containing a list of other peers that currently have all or part of the file. The users computer then collects bits
of the file from each of these other peers and, once it has all of the files
bits, reconstructs them into the file itself. At no point does an individual
peer deliver an entire song, movie, document, or other file directly to
another individual peer, nor is there a central node from which a godseye-view of the network is attainable. There are several other variations
on P2P network architectures, but currently these are the three primary
flavorsthe vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry of file sharing.
These distinctions are neither academic nor sheer computer science
geekery. They have profound implications for the degree of culpability,
surveillance, and censorship the networks themselves can be legally assigned or subjected to. Napster, owing to its centralized architecture, was
the most vulnerable to both legal and technical challenges. Because the
service was capable of identifying copyrighted files on its servers and restricting their transfer, it was found liable for contributory infringement
and vicarious infringement for the unlicensed sharing behaviors of its
users.5 Once its servers were shut down, the service became unusable.
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The same could not be said of more decentralized file sharing services such as Grokster and LimeWire.6 Because these file sharing services
lacked network oversight and therefore could not be found liable for contributory or vicarious infringement, they were ultimately found liable
for inducement of copyright infringement, a new legal standard that
emerged from the US Supreme Courts decision in the Grokster case.7
Yet despite these rulings, the networks were not as easy to shut down as
Napster was. For instance, even though LimeWire stopped publishing its
software and remotely disabled many of its users copies via a back door
in the programs code, an open-source Pirate Edition of the software
emerged two days later and remains fully functional and active at the time
of writing despite the efforts of LimeWire and the RIAA to shut it down.8
BitTorrent is the most difficult flavor of P2P to prosecute or contain
successfully. Because the BitTorrent protocol is freely available for programmers to use, there are many open-source software front-ends based
on it, each of which operates completely independently of its developer,
BitTorrent Inc. And because the sharing process is broken up into so
many moving parts and reduced to the scale of bits, issues of legal liability
become far more complex. Is hosting or contributing to an index a violation of copyright, even though the torrent file is only a text file about a
copyrighted work, rather than the work itself? Is joining or maintaining a
tracker a violation of copyright, even if the tracker is neither contributing
to nor inducing infringement, in a legal sense? Is there a de minimis, or a
minimum number of digital 1s and 0s that need to be shared by a given
peer before they constitute an infringement? Would sharing a single bit
of data, technically indistinguishable from any other bit of data on the
Internet, constitute infringement if it were related to a torrent for a song
or a film? These questions have yet to be addressed definitively by either
legislation or case law, although the music and film industries, as well as
several governments around the globe, have taken legal and quasi-legal
action against many parties including scores of trackers and hundreds of
thousands of individual BitTorrent users.
In short, P2P file sharing is not simply a piece of rogue technology
that enables pirates to infringe on copyrights. It is a diverse assortment
of technologies and platforms with a broad range of uses in a variety
of different contexts. While some specific P2P architectures are vulnerable to some varieties of legal challenges and technological restrictions,
others are technically legal or as yet untested, and many remain impervious to any kind of legal or technological regulation except perhaps total
surveillance or closure of all digital communications networks. And, as
75
network technologies continue to evolve in the coming years, it is likely

that the range and complexity of P2P platforms will increase as well.
There is no preordained path for social or technological development,
but it seems very likely that in the near future, our mobile devices will
be able to establish ad hoc, locally aware P2P networks9 that eschew
Internet traffic altogether and remain virtually undetectable and beyond
surveillance by centralized authorities. Torrent tracker The Pirate Bay
has already made moves in a similar direction, announcing plans on its
blog to launch low-orbit drone airplanes hosting its servers.10 Given the
likelihood that technological developments such as these will continue
to outpace efforts at policing and enforcement,11 any economic or legal
strategy that attempts to contain P2P rather than accept and embrace it
is very likely to fail.
Does P2P Hurt the Music Industry?

One of the primary reasons that the traditional music industry views
P2P as such a threat is because it disrupts conventional power relations.
During the twentieth century, the major labels built their empires on
the basis of a distribution cartel; only the big six (as things stood in
1999, before recent waves of consolidation) had the economic might
and the political heft to saturate retailers and airwaves alike with their
music. Independent artists and labels were either left out in the cold, or
charged an exorbitant rate to participate in the marketplace. And music
fans were essentially left with a choice between musical Coke and Pepsi;
unless they were fortunate enough to live near an indie music retailer
or a free-form radio broadcaster, their options were limited to whatever
the major labels were promoting at that moment.
P2P changed this dynamic profoundly, by leveling the playing field
and lowering the barriers for music distribution. Although this process
didnt erase the strategic benefits accruing to large industrial organizations (marketing still costs a fortune), it did undermine one of the core
mechanisms by which they accrued and retained market power. Yet
when the music industry critiques P2P and decries the piracy that takes
place on file sharing networks, it rarely does so by complaining that its
distribution cartel has been compromised. Instead, it argues a more direct economic threat, that consumers use file sharing networks as an
alternative to paying for music and therefore that every download on a
P2P network can be viewed as a lost sale.
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Clearly, this notion is absurd if its taken literally; so much music is

downloaded freely from the Internet that if each downloaded song were
sold at market value the total amount of money spent would outstrip the
music industrys revenues, even in the best of years, by orders of magnitude. US District Court Judge James P. Jones, adjudicating a case brought
against Daniel Dove, a member of a BitTorrent tracker site called EliteTorrents, has pointed this out as well. In his decision, he faults the music
industrys logic, observing that the RIAAs request problematically assumes that every illegal download resulted in a lost sale, and pointing
out that it is a basic principle of economics that as price increases, demand decreases. Customers who download music and movies for free
would not necessarily spend money to acquire the same product.12 Yet
logic would dictate that if not every download represents a lost sale, at
least some of them must. And doesnt this subset of downloads directly
hurt the music industrys bottom line?
Researchers have been grappling with this questionattempting to
assess and quantify the impact of P2P on music sales revenuesat least
since Napsters debut. I was among the first to publish findings on this
subject, as an analyst for Jupiter Research in 2000. At the time, my clients
included the RIAA and all of the major labels, so my purpose was to help
the industry assess whether a genuine threat existed, and to develop market strategies that would mitigate or accommodate these new technologies. We employed a robust methodology, fielding a survey of over two
thousand US online music fans.13 At one point in the survey, we asked
whether respondents purchasing habits had increased, decreased, or remained consistent since they first started visiting music sites. At another
point, we asked whether they had ever used Napster. Given the range
and order of questions on the survey, there was no way respondents
could know that we were looking for a statistical relationship between
these two factors.14 Our results were surprising, even to us:
No segment of respondents was more likely as a whole to have
increased its music purchasing than the segment of Napster users
was. . . . Napster users were 45 percent more likely to have increased their music purchasing habits than online music fans who
dont use the software were. This trend holds true regardless of
factors such as age, income, online tenure (the number of years
that an individual has been using the Web), and overall music purchasing level.15
77
In other words, we found that, among online adults who liked music,
Napster was actually helping music sales. Although some were no doubt
using the service as a replacement for traditional music retail, others
were using it as a vehicle to discover and sample new music, increasing
their enthusiasm about music products and driving them to purchase
more. In 2002, I published follow-up research, based on a newer Jupiter
survey, showing that file sharing continued to have a mixed effect on
music purchasing habits, with a net positive effect overall. This time,
we found that file sharers were 75 percent more likely than the average
online music fan to have increased their music purchasing habits since
they started visiting online music sites.16
In the decade since then, dozens of researchers worldwide have published scores of studies on this subject in both academic and commercial
venues, and the results have run the gamut from positive to neutral to
negative for the industry. A thorough review of all the relevant literature is beyond the scope of this chapter, but there are several recently
published meta-analyses that attempt to summarize and integrate this
literature. The business professors Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman
Strumpf have been among the most active in this area, publishing a number of frequently cited articles on P2P and media economics since 2004.
As they argue in their most recent work on the subject, because the
theoretical results are inconclusive, the effect of file sharing on industry
profitability is largely an empirical question. Yet, reviewing the empirical literature, they find that the results are decidedly mixed. While the
majority of studies find that file sharing reduces sales, there are several
that document a positive effect, and an important group of papers
reports that file sharing does not hurt sales at all.17 In short, there is no
research consensus on the subject, either theoretically or empirically.
Similarly, the technology journalist Drew Wilson has recently published
an extensive series on the P2P news website ZeroPaid analyzing twenty
published research reports related to P2Ps economic effects. He has
found that a great deal of the research undermines the RIAAs claims,
and that some of the corroborating research uses spurious logic or questionable methodologies.18
If we can conclude anything at all from the research in this field, its
that the relationship between P2P and music economics is anything but
simple. Studies have produced variant findings in part because different
groups of people share music in different ways, at different times, under
different circumstances, for different reasons. Similarly, the music industry has undergone significant changes in recent years owing to a variety
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of factors, many of which are so closely related to P2P that its hard
to control for one and measure the impact of the other independently
(I discuss these other factors in chapter 5).
Even framing the question introduces difficulties. If we look only
at music sales, are we ignoring revenues that accrue from non-retail
sources such as licensing and subscriptions? If we look at industry profitability, which firms count as industry and which dont, and whose
numbers are we going to use to assess profit and loss? If we are interested in the total economic impact of P2P, do we take into account
second-order effects such as sales of concert tickets and merchandise, or
word-of-mouth marketing? To my knowledge, nobody has yet addressed
these questions definitively, and its entirely likely that a definitive answer is downright impossible. Far from being an unmitigated threat to
the bottom line for artists, composers, labels, and other stakeholders in
the music economy, P2P is more of a digital Rorschach test; any assessment of it is far more likely to reflect the viewers biases and preconceptions than to represent an objective measure of its total impact on the
marketplace.
Economic and Social Benefits of P2P

Although the net economic impact of P2P on the music retail marketplace is an open question, there is ample evidence to suggest that, in
many cases, it contributes substantially to record label bottom lines and
has a positive effect on the broader music economy, and that it has other
beneficial social and cultural effects that cant be quantified. Even the
major labels have come to recognize many of these benefits, repositioning themselves to take advantage of the newly energized, P2P-driven
fan base for their artists. In recent years, traditional artist contracts have
been largely supplanted by 360 deals, in which a record label or other
institution (e.g., the concert promoter LiveNation) will participate in
all artist revenue streams including recordings, concerts, merchandise,
publishing, endorsements, and licensing. Because of the diversification
and control that 360 deals offer labels, they are so lucrative and lowoverhead that theyve come under heavy fire from pro-artist advocates.
In the words of the industry analyst Bob Lefsetz, who advised aspiring
artists against signing such deals, they want more of YOUR money for
doing less work.19
Between these 360 deals and a host of other emerging revenue
streams, record labels have significantly offset the decreases in album
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retail revenues over the past decade or two. These new revenues typically arent reflected in the infamous figures depicting the music industrys precipitous decline, and are rarely mentioned in the industrys piracy
crusade rhetoric. Some of the most significant new revenue sources for
labels include:
Performance rights royalties. This category includes the licensed use
of music in broadcast, specifically royalties from satellite, digital and

Internet broadcasting. A decade ago, these revenues were virtually nonexistent, because AM/FM radio in the United States pays royalties only
to publishers. But in 2011, according to the IFPI, global performance
rights from these new, digital broadcast platforms yielded $905 million
in revenue for labels.20 It is important to note that, unlike sales revenues,
the labels are not required to pay artist royalties on this income; an additional $905 million in royalties (or thereabouts) were paid directly to
artists and unions by collection societies.
Synch rights royalties. In addition to the licensing revenues described
above, record labels receive synchronization or master use rights revenues whenever their songs are used in television shows, video games,
movies, or commercials. The music industry only began reporting
revenues from this source in 2012, when it claimed $342 million for the
previous year. The IFPI, which bases its estimates on revenues reported
by member labels, may be underestimating the actual figure considerably. In 2011, the music licensing attorney Steve Gordon (a former major
label executive and widely read author)21 told me that in the last 20
years, master use licensing has gone way up and become a new, important income source for the labels.22 Overall, Gordon estimates that this
market brings the labels closer to $12 billion per year.
Live events. The live music events sector has climbed steeply in value
over the past decade, as ticket prices have escalated and audiences awash
in digital recordings increasingly crave live contact with their favorite artists. Today, this sector is worth well over $20 billion annually, roughly
three times what it was a decade ago. Its difficult to say what percentage
of this accrues to labels through 360 deals, but a conservative estimate
would be over $1 billion and growing, compared with zero a decade
ago. There is little question that free online music sharing has played a
significant role in driving these gains; as Lady Gaga told the Sunday Times
in 2010, she doesnt mind about people downloading her music for free,
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because you know how much you can earn off touring, right? . . . Make
musicthen tour. Its just the way it is today. 23
Sponsorships and endorsements. Traditionally, many popular musicians
have turned their noses up at corporate sponsorship, viewing it as a form

of selling out that reflected poorly on their perceived authenticity. This
attitude has changed in recent years, as the amount of money spent on
music sponsorship in North America alone has climbed to $1.17 billion
in 2011,24 up from $867 million in 2007.25 Again, it is difficult to specify a
specific percentage of this figure that flows into record label coffers, but
the amount is probably in the high tens or low hundreds of millions of
dollars a year.
Hardware royalties. In various countries worldwide, record labels earn
royalties on the sale of various forms of storage media (e.g., CD-Rs,
DATs) and hardware devices (e.g., MP3 players, CD burners), which
are both markets driven by free music sharing. Its difficult to establish
exactly the volume of revenues accruing to labels from this sector, but
given that these product categories represent tens of billions of dollars in
sales each year, the figure must be considerable.
Thus, while the amount of money accruing to large record labels from
the direct sale of music to consumers has dropped significantly over the
past decade, these losses have been mitigated to a great degree by a variety of new and rapidly growing sources of revenue, driven in part by
the free distribution of music via online channels. Although its very difficult to establish whether this nets positively or negatively for any given
record label or even for record labels as a sector, there are a number of
recent analyses by researchers around the world that provide compelling
evidence that free music sharing has contributed to an increase in revenue for musicians themselves and for the music economy overall.26 For
instance, based on a variety of sources, the editors of techdirt, a prominent media and technology blog, have shown that the musicians share of
the overall US music economy grew 16 percent between 2002 and 2010,
to $16.7 billion, while the overall entertainment economy has grown by
50 percent in the past decade.27 Even the IFPIs own figures show that
an economic index it calls the broader music industry (an amorphous
and changing category including some forms of consumer spending that
dont directly affect the labels bottom lines) has grown from $132 billion
in 2005 to $168 billion in 2010. A great many prominent recording and
81
performing artists have acknowledged this publicly as well. As 50 Cent

told an interviewer in 2007, What is important for the music industry to
understand is that this really doesnt hurt the artists. . . . A young fan may
be just as devout and dedicated no matter if he bought it or stole it.28
These findings have already had policy implications that contrast
sharply with the recommendations of the IFPI and other piracy crusaders.
For instance, immediately following the 2011 release of a report it had
commissioned on the subject, the Swiss government announced that it
would allow its citizens to download copyrighted content freely, from
unlicensed channels, for personal use. The Swiss report found that
money saved by consumers via P2P was being reinvested in newer,
more innovative entertainment products and cultural practices, while
anti-piracy efforts simply cost more than they saved, both economically
and socially. As the authors of the report argue, the process is necessarily
one of Darwinian adaptation: Winners will be those who are able to use
the new technology to their advantages and losers those who missed this
development and continue to follow old business models.29
In addition to the more quantifiable dimensions of P2Ps economic
impact, it offers several widely acknowledged benefits for artists, labels,
and musical culture in general. One of its most valuable roles for the
industry at large is as a conduit for marketing and promotion, providing
a platform for new and emerging musicians to find a listener base, for
established artists to deepen their relationship with their fans, and for
record labels and other industry organizations to defray some of the costs
of traditional media. Terra Firma, the private equity firm that owned
EMI at the time, acknowledged this in its 2007 Annual Review, writing
that historically, the industry has viewed digital principally as a piracy
threat. In reality, it offers new possibilities across the value chain, from
discovering and producing through to promoting music.30 In fact, the
labels have exploited the user bases of online file sharing networks for
marketing and distribution for years, partnering with platform providers
like SNOCAP, QTrax, and Grooveshark to place commercial tracks
within peer-to-peer environments and relying on consumers to promote
and distribute both free and for-pay digital music on their behalf. Many
of the worlds best-known recording artists have embraced this principle
as well, either explicitly leveraging P2P as a marketing and distribution
platform or simply acknowledging its value as a conduit for fan relations.
As Shakira told the Daily Mail in 2009, I like whats going on [with file
sharing] because I feel closer to the fans and the people who appreciate
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the music. . . . Its the democratisation of music in a way. And music is a

gift. Thats what it should be, a gift.31
Online music-sharing platforms and social media have also proven a
vital platform for artists, labels, and other content providers to research
the marketplace more effectively. This is hardly a new idea; in 1999, I
published a research report advising entertainment companies to track
the usage of downloaded material to better understand their markets in
aggregate and to build closer relationships with individual consumers,32
and even back then, popular acts like Rage Against the Machine33 and
Tom Petty34 were already leaking tracks online both to gauge and to
stoke consumer demand (and also to cash in on the inevitable press coverage). In the years since then, first a cottage industry and then a mature
market research sector have emerged around delivering intelligence to
record labels, movie studios, and software publishers based on the analysis of free sharing, commenting, and linking on social platforms including
P2P.35 Today, both newer firms such as MusicMetric, Next Big Sound,
and BigChampagne (perhaps the first to track actual P2P behaviors in
aggregate for a market research product), and established research titans
such Nielsen and NPD offer such products, and they are used widely
throughout the media and entertainment industries.
Beyond the business and economic spheres, P2P also serves some important social functions. One effect has been to broaden significantly
what we might call the musical public sphere. In the pre-Internet music
industry, there were only three channels providing an opportunity for
recording artists to share their work with potential fans: retail, radio,
and television. Each of these channels was, and continues to be, highly
concentrated in its ownership structure, as in the record label sector.
This high concentration, along with the native technological limitations
of traditional media (e.g., limited shelf space and airtime) drastically diminishes the number and range of artists who are able to share their
work through such channels. Internet-based distribution, especially P2P
file sharing, eliminated these bottlenecks. While a commercial radio
station may play fewer than a hundred artists work in a given week,
and Walmarts shelves may carry a few hundred at best, millions of artists have the capacity to reach their audiences around the world via the
long tail36 of P2P networks.
These networks are also largely immune to the influence of payola37
and other anticompetitive forms of promotion that have plagued traditional broadcast media virtually since their inception. As a result, music
83
fans are able to develop their tastes based primarily on their social connections to other fans instead of being dependent on media gatekeepers
who have been paid to keep most artists and styles out of the public eye
(and ear). Thus, as several researchers have shown, P2P has both improved the accuracy with which consumers are able to match music to
their tastes and broadened those tastes.38 For musical culture in general,
P2P increases the prevalence of diverse and innovative music and also
allows songs, artists, and styles to remain in the public ear far beyond
their traditional market lifespan. As the music blogger Eric Lumbleau,
editor of Mutant Sounds, argued in a recent Wire magazine article, free
music sharing serves an important social function: File sharers uploading rare and out of print records challenge official histories of music.
This activity has not only helped to democratize musical culture but has
also made the marketplace more sensitive to diverse tastes and helped
it to thrive by catering to those tastes. Lumbleau boasts that numerous
reissues have come to market as a direct result of those albums having
first been discovered on Mutant Sounds and/or made viable enough to reissue because of the increased profile that a previously obscure album has
received by being posted on Mutant Sounds.39 This is not a self-serving
claim; many high-profile musicians have made similar arguments. In the
words of Pink Floyds Nick Mason, File sharing means a new generation
of fans for us. Its a great thing to have another generation discovering
your music and thinking youre rather good. File sharing plays a part in
that, because that generation dont do it any other way.40
Of course, pirates have been responsible for keeping obscure and
out-of-print music in the public sphere for generations, and perhaps since
the dawn of the recorded music industry itself. As Adrian Johns argues,
music bootleggers in the 1950s who sold jazz and opera records wanted
to make money, but they were in business for more than profit alone.
They justified their actions in terms of furnishing a public archive of
classics that the recording industry was overlooking in search of larger
markets.41 Other musical traditions benefited similarly. The ethnomusicologist Harry Smith, whose groundbreaking compilation Anthology
of American Folk Music more or less single-handedly inaugurated the 1960s
folk revivaland in so doing forever changed the tenor of American
musicincluded dozens of songs still under copyright, without permission. As he argued in his liner notes, Only through recordings is it possible to learn of those developments that have been so characteristic of
American music, and therefore the power of such recordings to make
historic changes rests in their making easily available [to a broader
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audience] the rhythmically and verbally specialized musics of groups

living in mutual social and cultural isolation.42 To put it simply, Smith
believed that, by uniting the diverse ethnic and regional recordings in
his collection, he was somehow uniting America as well. Far from being
branded a criminal for his blatant rejection of copyright, Smith was celebrated throughout his life, and was even awarded a Chairmans Merit
Award, shortly before his death, at the 1991 Grammys. In his acceptance
speech, he told the smiling crowd of music industry executives and major
label artists that Im glad to say my dreams came true. I saw America
changed by music.43
Many Artists Support (And Are Supported by) P2P

I have already mentioned several high-profile recording artists who have
publicly voiced their support for P2P and free music sharing for a variety
of reasons, but these are only the tip of the iceberg. In my expert report for Arista v. Lime Group,44 I cite dozens more, and a now-defunct
blog called Pirate Verbatim collected over a hundred such quotes between 2010 and 2011.45 Of course, not every artist supports file sharing;
several prominent musicians, such as Bono and Lily Allen, have come
out strongly against the practice, and others who had expressed support
(such as Shakira)46 have recanted or repositioned at the behest of the
industry. But a great many (perhaps the majority of) working musicians
continue to support the practice, and an increasing number of both independent and major label recording artists are embracing P2P as a positive dimension of their fan relations and business strategies.
Several prominent artists, such as Steve Winwood,47 Counting
Crows,48 Green Day49 and Heart50 have actively released their new music
to P2P networks, some of them prior to the official release date. Many
others have experimented with innovative distribution and revenue
models that rely on P2P either tacitly or explicitly as a central element.
A great example is Nine Inch Nails. For his 2008 album Ghosts I-IV, frontman Trent Reznor parted ways with his label, Interscope, and released
the music on his own website under a Creative Commons license, allowing his fans to freely redistribute the music in a noncommercial capacity,
on file sharing networks and elsewhere. In addition to freely available
digital files, NIN also released the music under a number of premium
packaged formats, including multi-track DVDs, heavy duty vinyl, and
an ultra-deluxe limited edition box set costing $300.51 The 2,500 ultradeluxe box sets sold out in a day,52 and within the first week, NIN had
85
grossed over $1.6 million in sales revenues across all formats.53 Retail distribution was handled by Sony Musics RED division, as well as Amazon
MP3. The albums CD release was successful enough to win it fourteenth
place on the Billboard 200 chart, as well as the number 1 position on
the Dance/Electronic Albums chart. For his following album, The Slip,
Reznor pursued a similar strategy.54
Another excellent example is the band Radiohead. In 2007, the band,
which had recently parted with longtime label EMI over financial and
strategic disputes, self-released its album In Rainbows on its own website,
offering fans the opportunity to pay anything they liked for the songs in
DRM-free MP3 format. Despite making the music effectively free and
freely shareable, the band had a significant commercial success. Although
official sales figures for the album have never been announced, the bands
publisher, Warner Chappell, reported that sales of the new album on the
bands site during its first twelve weeks of release yielded more income
than total online and off-line sales of their prior, major-label album.55
Roughly two months after the self-release, the band shipped a retail CD
version of the album via major label distribution deals. In its first week of
official release, sales of the CD format pushed In Rainbows to first place
on the Billboard 200, as well as the UK Album Chart.56
A third example is the rock/R&B megastar Prince. More than almost any other popular recording artist, Prince has shown an enthusiasm from the Internets earliest years to experiment with new forms
of distribution, sales, and marketing. Although his stated position has
been subject to numerous shifts and reversals (not long ago, he declared
that the Internet is completely over),57 he has benefited immensely
from innovative distribution strategies based on free distribution and
redistribution. In 2007, for instance, he released his new album Planet
Earth as a CD included free in three million issues of Britains Mail on Sunday tabloid newspaper. In addition to being paid a reported half million
dollars plus royalties by the papers publisher, Prince went on to play a
twice-extended, sold-out, twenty-one-night engagement at Londons 02
arena during the subsequent two months, which grossed over twentytwo million dollars in revenues.58 A copy of Planet Earth was also given
away free to every ticket purchaser. This newspaper distribution strategy
was so successful, he repeated it three years later with his 20Ten album.59
Although Prince has been a vociferous opponent of file sharing at times
(and has sued torrent tracker The Pirate Bay), there is little question that
his financial success as a touring artist owes some of its longevity to his
efforts to make his music freely available for people to access and share.
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Although Nine Inch Nails, Radiohead, and Prince were pioneering

innovators who could not have predicted the successful results of their
experiments in the late 2000s, countless other artists have followed confidently in their footsteps, and improved on their models, in the years since
then. Singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens sold over ten thousand copies of
his 2010 EP, All Delighted People, from his artist page on Bandcamp.com
in a single weekend, despite making the album available for free streaming and only promoting the release via a single e-mail, a single Twitter
message, and a single Facebook post. Based on these sales alone (the
album wouldnt be released on CD for over three months), it debuted
at number 48 on the Billboard 200 chart, and climbed to number 27 in
the following week. As Stevens explained in an interview, he considered
offering free access to the music to be an integral element of his success. In his words, I think it really helped that people could stream the
whole album. My personal theory is that people can stream anything in
its entirety anyway [via YouTube]. . . . The question for record labels and
musicians is how far the buy button is from that stream.60
A year and a half later, indie punk musician Amanda Palmer (formerly
of the major-label band The Dresden Dolls) financed her new album and
tour via the crowd-funding website Kickstarter.com, raising almost $1.2
million in a single month from 24,883 individual backers61 without any
corporate funding or marketing support, and becoming an overnight
blogosphere DIY sensation in the process. She charged only one dollar
for a digital copy of the entire album in DRM-free format (tacitly acknowledging that its market value is practically nil), while offering more
unique formats and merchandise (such as signed art books and custompainted turntables) for larger pledges. While the costs to provide these
additional incentives were high, she still anticipated netting more revenue than she would from a major label contract for the same music.62
Palmer didnt simply stumble on a million-dollar accident; this was a
well-considered strategy tailored to the post-P2P media and economic
environment. As she explained nearly two years earlier, in a speech at
Harvard University:
Now with content being freely available, as we know, in the cloud,
there has to be a massive shift [in the way musicians are remunerated]. With everyone screaming that the music business is collapsing and Oh my god, everyones torrenting and this is terrible for
business, I think we should be celebrating the fact that while music
is free and content is free, we also have the technology for artists to
87
stand up on their boxes, in their virtual street corner, in their place

in the Internet. And you, as the audience, if youre moved by what
an artist does, if youre moved by a song that I put out for free, you
can put in a dollar. And you can know that youve had a very real
exchange with me, with no middlemen, and no label, and no promoter, no nothingits just you and me.63
These cases, though celebrated, are becoming the rule rather than the
exception; collectively, over five thousand music projects raised nearly
$35 million in crowd-funding on Kickstarter alone in 2012, and that number is sure to skyrocket; the amount of money raised via the site more
than tripled from 2011 to 2012.64 Similarly, in December 2012, Bandcamp
achieved the milestone of distributing over a million dollars to its artists
in a single month.65
In addition to the many famous musicians using P2P and digital music
sharing to extend and grow their careers, there are also many recent examples of obscure or emerging musicians whose careers were propelled
into the stratosphere via free online distribution. One widely celebrated
example is teen pop sensation Justin Bieber. After his mother posted
home videos of the Stratford, Ontario, fourteen year old singing (unlicensed) pop R&B songs to YouTube, he was discovered accidentally
on the site by a former label marketing executive, who helped him sign a
recording contract with Island Records.66 By the time his first single was
released in 2009, the singer was already the twenty-third-most-popular
musician on YouTube. After his commercial release, Bieber continued
to grow in popularity, fueled by free sharing on YouTube (where, at
the time of writing, he has the second most popular video of all time,
with over 819 million views), Twitter (where he is the currently secondmost-popular account, with over thirty-two million followers), and P2P
networks (where he is consistently among the most shared musicians,
according to BigChampagne). None of this free sharing kept Biebers first
two albums from selling like gangbusters (each earned RIAA-certified
Platinum status in the United States and Canada), and its clearly only
helped fuel the Bieber fever driving millions of fans to buy his merchandise and attend his live concerts for nearly half a decade thus far.
Another example of an artist climbing from obscurity to fame on the
coattails of free Internet distribution is the Gregory Brothers, a Brooklynbased indie band best known for their YouTube video series Auto-Tune
the News (ATTN), in which they remix and harmonize television news
footage. Although ATTN has enjoyed significant traffic (millions of views
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per video) and press attention since its debut in spring 2009, the band was
catapulted to mainstream success with the July 2010 release of ATTN
episode 12b, BED INTRUDER SONG!!!! This video, which remixed a
Huntsville, Alabama local news story about an attempted rape and featured the colorful personality of the victims brother, Antoine Dodson,
garnered over fifty million YouTube views within its first four months
of release.67 Additionally, within a month of its first appearance, thousands of other YouTube fans had posted their own interpretations of
the song, accounting for tens of millions of additional views. This viral
success translated to a degree of market success beyond the confines of
YouTube; the song was made available for paid download on iTunes and
charted on the Billboard Hot 100, a rare accomplishment for an iTunesonly song by an unknown act. The Gregory Brothers shared 50 percent
of writing credit and revenues with Dodson,68 who has also used the
video to sell merchandise and music of his own and has reportedly used
the revenues to move his family out of the projects to a safer home.69
As these two examples make clear, P2P alone cannot take all the credit
for launching new musicians careers; social media and online video sites
such as YouTube (both of which also qualify as free online distribution and frequently lack licenses from copyright holders) have played
an increasingly important role since the mid- to late 2000s. Recently,
the Internet researcher Alex Leavitt reported on Twitter that a major
record label had seen 42 percent of its new musical acts originate as YouTube cover artists.70 This statistic, though anecdotal in nature, reflects
an evident truth: namely, that sharing unlicensed versions of commercial
music freely via the Internet has replaced the traditional demo tape as
the primary vector for amateur or independent performers to shop their
wares to the music industry and to a broader audience. While Bieber is
the best-known example of this phenomenon, my personal favorite is
Arnel Pineda.
Pineda served as the lead singer of The Zoo, a popular classic rock
cover band in his native Philippines. After the band posted several cover
versions of songs by Journey to YouTube, Journey cofounder and guitarist Neal Schon contacted him to ask whether hed be interested in
auditioning to be the bands lead singer. Pineda got the job; the resulting
album, Revelation, sold a million copies within six months of its release
in June 2008,71 and their tour that year grossed over $35 million. Fortunately, Schon and Journey saw something of value in The Zoos YouTube covers; had the copyright holders simply censored or prosecuted
the cover band for its piracy, Pineda might have been bankrupted,
89
Journey might have missed out on an ideal lead singer (and a $35 million
paycheck), and Journey fans around the world might not have been able
to enjoy their new album and live concerts.
P2P vs. Traditional Music Economics

In December 2011, the digital storage locker service Megaupload (a
website that enabled people to store, transfer, and share large media
files and which has been vilified by the RIAA and others for encouraging piracy) unveiled a new marketing campaign featuring a cavalcade of
popular and major label musicians such as Macy Gray, Sean P. Diddy
Combs, and Kanye West singing the services praises both literally and
figuratively. Predictably, the video became a viral hit; within hours,
#megaupload was a trending topic on Twitter, and millions had
viewed the video.72
Then something interesting happened: the video disappeared from
YouTube, which offered an explanatory note that this video contains
content from UMG [Universal Music Group], who has blocked it on
copyright grounds. In other words, the largest record label in the world
had filed a DMCA takedown notice,73 claiming that it owned some of the
videos contents. The problem is, the record label had no legal basis for
its actions; while artists such as P. Diddy have recording contracts with
UMG, these contracts dont typically prohibit them from appearing in
advertisements. The labels control copyrights to recordings, not to the
artists themselves.
Within a week, YouTube had reinstated the video,74 after finding that
UMGs copyright claims were baseless. Yet, in the course of that weeks
outage, the label successfully interrupted a viral marketing campaign,
halting its ascent and probably preventing it from being viewed by millions of people. Ironically, UMG resorted to false copyright claims in
order to do battle with a site it accused of abusing intellectual property.
The following month, Megauploads founder (and the star of the censored video) Kim Dotcom was arrested in his home country of New
Zealand and indicted by the US Department of Justice for running an
international organized criminal enterprise allegedly responsible for massive worldwide online piracy of numerous types of copyrighted works.75
At the time of writing, the case is still pending. After six weeks in jail,
Dotcom was released on bail. He is currently confined to an 80 km radius
around his home, and is prohibited from using the Internet, out of concern that he has the ability to use it for wrong purposes.76
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Why did UMG invoke false copyright claims to prevent the video
from being seen? Was it simply a matter of using any means necessary
to combat a website it considers a dangerous pirate? Perhaps so, but
I believe the company was equally concerned with the videos actual
contents, which consisted of major label artists celebrating the site. A
foundational element of the recording industrys anti-piracy narrative
is the argument that label-backed music distribution support[s]77 artists, while its efforts to crack down on unlicensed distribution protect[s]
artists.78 So its problematic when some of the best-known and bestselling major label artists publicly extol one of the very services the industry has identified as a threat.
The truth of the matter is that, historically, the major labels have done
a fairly poor job of supporting and protecting artists, and therefore artists
today have little incentive to fight for the status quo on behalf of companies that are routinely criticized for unfair or unethical business practices. Most notably, major label record contracts typically include clauses
whose primary effect is to diminish actual royalties paid to the recording
artist. As the Future of Music Coalition, a pro-musician advocacy group,
argues in a lengthy critique of these contractual hijinks, Outside of the
major label music world many of these clauses are seen as an affront to
basic logic.79
Several economic analyses have demonstrated the effects of these
practices on actual artist revenues. The celebrated rock producer Steve
Albini (Pixies, Nirvana, PJ Harvey) wrote a widely read and reprinted
1993 article in The Baffler, demonstrating how such clauses, and other
economic factors, could conceivably lead to band members signed to a
$250,000 contract taking home roughly $4,000 apiece for their work.80
More recently, in 2010, the online magazine The Root, in conjunction with
Don Passman, author of All You Need to Know about the Music Business,81
conducted an economic analysis corroborating this point, demonstrating that for every $1,000 in music sold, the average musician makes
$23.40.82 These economic disparities pertain even in the digital music
economy; according to court documents filed in 2011 by rapper Chuck
D, artists signed to UMG get paid $80.33 for every 1,000 iTunes downloads sold.83
Even the more justifiable contractual elements can be damaging to
artists bottom lines. For instance, recoupment clauses require that
labels make back their expenditures for producing, distributing, and
marketing the music before any royalties are owed to the recording
artist. As the RIAA has admitted on its own website, fewer than one in
91
ten of its constituents album releases ever make back the money the
label has spent;84 therefore, by this logic, more than 90 percent of major
label artists never see royalties beyond the initial advance.
Aside from these contractual considerations, the major labels have
historically fought to diminish the degree of power, ownership, and revenue recognized by recording artists, in the interest of maximizing their
own profitability. One fairly recent example is their lobbying effort to insert four words into the text of the Satellite Home Viewer Improvement
Act of 1999, thereby with one tiny stroke reclassifying all recording artists labor as work-for-hire under copyright law. The practical effect of
this maneuver was to eliminate artists rights to recapture control of their
work via term reversion after their contracts had expired. Although
President Clinton signed this bill into law, subsequent Congressional testimony by major label artists such as Sheryl Crow and Don Henley led
to its repeal by the Senate. Despite this highly visible reversal, however,
the major labels and publishers have continued to fight copyright term
reversion. Most recently, a federal judge ruled in favor of Victor Willis,
composer of the song Y.M.C.A., in a test of this principle in 2012. Yet,
this story has only begun; it seems likely that the music industry will
continue to push the matter by any means necessary to avert a ticking
time bomb of mass copyright reversion from taking effect.85
Another highly visible, high-stakes battle between the major labels and
their artists has revolved around the issue of whether digital downloads
(such as those available from iTunes) are technically retail or licensing.
According to traditional artist contracts, retail royalties are significantly
lower (by a factor of about 3-to-1) than licensing royalties, which means
that the answer to this question could be worth billions of dollars to
either labels or artists. Recently, this battle has been waged in the form of
a lawsuit between rapper Eminem and Universal Music Group86 (the US
Supreme Court has declined to revisit an Appeals Court ruling in favor
of Eminem),87 as well as an ongoing class action suit brought against
UMG by a variety of musicians including Rob Zombie and Rick James.88
In short, the relationship between the major labels and the artists they
purport to represent has historically been a fraught one, and continues
to be contentious. Although many benefits, such as fame, legitimacy,
and the chance of riches, accrue from a major label relationship, it is no
surprise that even successful artists continue to express support for P2P
and other forms of free online music sharing, as, in their eyes, the benefits
must far outweigh the risks. For the labels, this support has led to numer92
CHAPTER 4
ous public defections and embarrassmentsa consequence I discuss in

greater detail in chapter 6.
PEER-TO-PEER file sharing and other forms of free online music
distribution have played a complex and contentious role in the ongoing
transformation of musical culture and economics. While the recording
industry decries these services as rogue technologies and has painted
their hundreds of millions of users as pirates, research shows that it is
difficult if not impossible to ascertain whether P2P has a positive, negative, or neutral effect on music sales. The evidence also suggests that, in
many ways, free sharing grows the overall music economy, empowers
and enriches recording artists, and contributes to a more vibrant musical
culture. These benefits, which contrast with the historical powerlessness
and poverty faced by most musicians in the traditional music economy,
help to explain why so many artists today publicly support and actively
employ P2P and free online sharing as crucial elements in their business
and marketing strategies.
Yet there is no arguing that traditional music sales have plummeted
in recent years and, as the music industry is quick to observe, that the
downturn coincided with the introduction of Napster. But if P2P cant
be blamed for whatever misfortunes the music industry has faced in recent years, what is a more plausible explanation? As I argue in the next
chapter, the reality is more complex, and more interesting, than simple
scapegoating would suggest; although digital media play a role, the precipitous drop in music sales during the first decade of the twenty-first
century can best be understood as the result of an unprecedented bubble
punctured in a perfect storm.
93
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CHAPTER 5
Bubbles and Storms

The Story behind the Numbers
WE ARE ALL familiar with this story: Everything was going swimmingly for the music industry until Napster hit. Sales were on the rise,
and the future looked brighter still. But since that fateful day in the summer of 1999 when P2P file sharing was unleashed on the world, music
sales have plummeted and a once-vital industry has been reduced to
a shadow of its former self. As Cary Sherman, RIAA chief executive,
lamented in the New York Times in 2012, music sales in the United States
are less than half of what they were in 1999, when the file-sharing site
Napster emerged, and [as a result] direct employment in the industry
ha[s] fallen by more than half since then.1
That P2P is squarely to blame for this turn of events is rarely questioned. The recording industry maintains that widespread piracy is the
biggest factor undermining the growth of the digital music business, and
continues to push for cooperation from online intermediaries such as
ISPs and search engines (largely in the form of surveillance and censorship) as a remedy, or at least a bulwark, against the tide of P2P and other
unauthorized channels of music distribution.2 Stanley Liebowitz, an
economics professor whose research on file sharing has been funded3
and often cited4by the RIAA, even claims that file-sharing has caused
the entire enormous decline in record sales that has occurred over the last
decade.5 The news media tend to reproduce this frame of analysis without critique, routinely referencing losses from file sharing or speaking
of sectors avoiding what happened to the music industry in their business coverage.
If this narrative has succeeded in becoming common knowledge,
a truism repeated in classrooms, boardrooms, and at cocktail parties
around the world, it has been aided in large part by the Chart. This
94
Figure 3. Chart by Stanley Liebowitz depicting the purported effect of P2P on music sales.
graphical argument has appeared in various forms, in hundreds of blogs

and publications, but each version tells essentially the same story: a market peak, followed by the introduction of P2P, followed by a long and
steep decline. An excellent example is the version of the Chart provided
by Liebowitz in his testimony on behalf of the plaintiffs in Arista v. Lime
Group (fig. 3), which has been reproduced in the Hollywood Reporter 6 and
elsewhere. Liebowitzs chart shows that music sales in the United States,
measured in terms of albums sold per capita, did indeed reach a historical
market peak shortly before the introduction of Napster, and have fallen
significantly since then. He also asserts that music sales would have continued to climb linearly, without leveling off or falling, had P2P not undermined this growing consumer demand (a claim that seems to defy the
basic tenets of logic). As he argued in Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum, another file
sharing case in which he was retained as an expert witness by the major
label plaintiffs, the clearest and probably the most compelling evidence
for file-sharings impact on sound recording sales is the timing of the rise
of file-sharing with the decline in sound recording sales.7 In other words,
according to the music industry, the coincidence of these two events is
the greatest proof that the former caused the latter.
I maintain, however, that the Chart and its accompanying narrative,
although they contain elements of truth, amount to little more than a
convenient fiction, scapegoating music fans and media innovators for the
BUBBLES AND STORMS
95
recording industrys own strategic failures and ascribing responsibility

to pirates and piracy for trends and events that are beyond anyones
control. While the introduction of Napster does correlate conveniently
with the beginning of a downward trend for music retail, so do a number
of other factors, and furthermore, as any statistician can tell you, correlation doesnt necessarily imply causation. As one statistics textbook
puts it, an observed correlation between two variables may be spurious.
That is, it may be caused by the influence of a third variable.8 In this
chapter, I describe many other variables that have played a role in the
transformation of the music economy over the past few decades, demonstrating that any part that P2P plays is relatively minimal. The larger
story involves a perfect bubblea confluence of economic, political,
and technological forces that drove the aggregate value of music sales
to unprecedented heights at the end of the twentieth centuryfollowed
by a perfect storm, which punctured this bubble and undermined the
music retail market. I briefly discuss the music industrys often-cited figures regarding the economic impact of piracy on jobs and productivity,
showing that independent research has debunked many of these claims.
Before I take up these points, however, I offer a chart of my own, depicting the IFPIs own published figures for the global music sales market
(fig. 4). It parallels Liebowitzs in many respects, although it represents
actual money spent on music rather than unit sales per capita. Most
salient, there is a steep two-decade climb, followed by a peak around
the turn of the century, followed by a steep decade-long dip. Also like
Liebowitzs and every other version of the Chart, this is as much a work of
art as a work of science. All data and methods of analysis have their biases
and inconsistencies, and market research published by the music industry
excels in both of these respects. Therefore, any researcher working with
the data must necessarily use his or her judgment in developing a meaningful set of figures as a basis of analysis. (If you arent keenly interested
in the detailed challenges of working with music industry market data,
feel free to skip to the next section).
There is no definitive tally of music industry market data. The IFPI,
the RIAA, and other official organs of the music industry regularly publish statistics, and these are often supplemented, cited, and reliant upon
data from third-party research companies, such as Nielsen SoundScan.
Yet there is rarely agreement even between two publications from the
same source let alone among these many sources. There are a variety of
reasons for this disparity. First of all, organizations such as the IFPI and
the RIAA routinely revise previously published figures, for a variety of
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CHAPTER 5
Figure 4. Global music sales revenue, 19692011

(inflation-adjusted $US billions).
reasons including changes to their internal data, analyses, and methodologies.9 Second, inflation makes longitudinal data difficult to compare.
Some of the difficulty is due to confusion (its not always clear which
years dollars are represented in a given publications figures), and some
of it is genuinely thorny math (inflation is not consistent from region
to region, market to market, and currency to currency). A separate but
related challenge is the fact that exchange rates between currencies differ on a daily basis; therefore, globally reported market figures in US
dollars are difficult to assess for a single year and a guesstimate at best for
longitudinal data. As the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD) warned in its own analysis of IFPI data, Global
sales figures in USD . . . must be used with caution due to fluctuating
US dollar exchange rate [sic] which can make year-to-year comparisons
difficult.10
In addition to these macroeconomic challenges, many of which pertain to any global marketplace, there are additional idiosyncrasies about
recording industry data that make them even knottier to unravel. For
one thing, there is a methodological inconsistency between some figures,
BUBBLES AND STORMS
97
which are based on analysis of retail sales data (e.g., SoundScan, which
the IFPI uses), and others (e.g., RIAA publications), which are based on
shipments, or the number of units record labels report sending to retailers,
which are then extrapolated to dollar figures. Each of these methods of
assessment has its strengths and weaknesses, but there is invariably a
significant quantitative gap between the two.
Another challenge is that the music industry sometimes reports sales
data in terms of trade value, or wholesale price, and at other times in
terms of retail value, or the price paid at market. Moreover, the conversion rate between retail and trade value differs from format to format, region to region, and year to year. For instance, the IFPI recently reported
figures that suggested an 83 percent retail markup for physical goods and
a 59 percent markup for digital goods in the United States in 2008, while
reporting a 107 percent markup for physical and a 73 percent markup for
digital in Austria in the same year.11 Given that the IFPIs older publications report retail value, while the newer ones tend to report trade value,
this makes longitudinal market analysis even more difficult.
Finally, there is the question of what the object of analysis is. Historically, the music industry only reported revenues accruing from the
global sale of physical goods in brick-and-mortar stores. As the industrys
revenue model has diversified, some additional income sources have
slowly been added, though others have not. For instance, global IFPI
figures have included performance royalties and digital sales (including
ringtones) for most of the past decade, and in 2012 began to include
synch license royalties. Given that these arent technically sales, and
have no retail markup, the process of comparing current to past global
market figures is a bit of an apples-to-oranges-to-watermelons process.
I discuss these challenges not to bemoan my job as a researcher or to
besmirch the integrity of the recording industry, but simply to point out
that it is theoretically impossible to describe the historical global music
marketplace with total accuracy, and that any market data that appear
in any publication must be understood as fundamentally interpretive in
nature. Nor are the resulting inconsistencies sufficiently small as to be
of academic interest only; they bear directly on the questions I address
in this chapter: namely, when and why did the music industrys fortunes
reverse? According to an IFPI publication from 2000, the global music
retail market peaked in 1996, followed by a market contraction, with
a 2 percent drop in 1999.12 By 2005, the IFPI was reporting two sets of
figures: in terms of variable dollars (at same-year exchange rates), the
market peaked in 1996, but in terms of fixed dollars (all years calculated
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at a 2004 exchange rate), the peak came in 1999.13 Today, all IFPI publications show a 1999 peak, and there is no discussion of fixed vs. variable
dollars. Perhaps the industry changed its analytical methods because it
believes fixed dollars are a more meaningful measure. Perhaps they just
make for a better story.
For my own version of the chart, I rely on data from two recent IFPI
publications. For 19692004, I use the variable-dollar figures reported in
the Recording Industry in Numbers 2005. I chose these figures because they
are the most recent official data going back that far, because they reflect
retail rather than wholesale, and because variable dollars more accurately reflect the role of macroeconomic factors (such as buying power)
in shaping the music economy over time. For more recent years, I use
the IFPIs numbers published in 2012 (which use fixed dollars). Because
these are reported in terms of trade revenue, I adjusted for retail based
on an average 70 percent markup across different regions and formats.
As I discussed above, the IFPI doesnt use a single conversion rate, but
this figure is both conservative relative to the range of percentages the
industry uses, and consistent in its results with many additional published
market data.14 All of my figures reflect inflation-adjusted 2011 US dollars.
The Perfect Bubble: 19852000

As the chart shows, global music sales revenues began to climb steeply
in the mid- to late 1980s. In the decade between 1985 and 1995, adjusting
for inflation, the market expanded by 324 percentmore than it had in
a generation, and far outstripping any previous gain in terms of actual
dollars spent. This explosion wasnt simply the result of people liking
music more than they had in the past, or of the product improving (say
what you will about the relative merits of 80s pop and metal, and 90s
grunge and hip-hop). To the contrary, it was the result of a combination
of factors, including a highly successful (and expensive) new recording
format, the consolidation of the music retail and broadcasting sectors, a
new generic strategy that focused on aggregating mass audiences, and a
booming consumer economy.
One of the biggest boons to the recording industry during the last two
decades of the twentieth century was the market success of the compact
disc. As I discussed in chapter 2, one of the primary reasons the music
industry has historically updated its distribution formats each decade or
two is to reinvigorate the marketplace, both renewing interest in recorded music as a consumer product and driving fans to upgrade their
BUBBLES AND STORMS
99
existing collections. The CD has been the most successful physical distribution format of all time by many measures, including the speed with
which it achieved market dominance and the total number of units sold
at its peak. First introduced to the market in 1983, retailers were already
touting the CDs potential to spark a replacement cycle by 1984.15 CDs
outsold microcassettes globally for the first time in 1993, and remained
the dominant sales format, in terms of revenues, through 2010. Only in
19981999 did Billboard magazine first raise the specter of diminishing
sales due to the maturing of the CD-replacement cycle,16 suggesting
that it had played a significant role in driving revenues for the past 15
years (fig. 5).
Another important factor in the expansion of the recorded music market during the 1980s and 90s was the transformation and consolidation of
the music retail sector. Until the 1970s, most people bought their music
at independent record shops or general merchandisers. While there were
some regional music specialty chain retailers such as Sam Goody and
Camelot Records, they were still a far cry from the global superstores
and megastores typified by Tower Records, HMV, and Virgin a decade
or two later. By the early 1980s, the head of the National Association of
Figure 5. Global music sales revenue, 19692011, and CD replacement cycle, 19841999.
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Recording Merchandisers (NARM) was confidently predicting the imminent death of mom and pop operations in the wake of further consolidation of the large retail chains.17 His words proved prescient; coasting
on the larger wave of industrial consolidation and the general transformation of retail into a mall-based, entertainment experience, the music
sector reinvented itself under the auspices of its new corporate owners,
forcing most independent retailers out of operation and streamlining and
standardizing the music shopping environment.
In the short term, this was a boon to music sales; it increased retail
space and foot traffic overall, brought many innovations in end-cap promotion and other forms of in-store and cooperative marketing, and made
price competition less likely. It also helped fuel sales for the industrys
biggest acts; with a single deal, a record label could effectively promote
its top artists in thousands of stores across the country and around the
world. In the longer term, however, consolidation had a strategic downside; with the mom-and-pop stores out of the picture, there was little
basis for customer loyalty, not much diversity in terms of music selection, and a strict, short-term bottom line driving all strategic decisions.
Within another decade, a new breed of big-box retailers such as Best
Buy, Circuit City, and Walmart began selling a significant amount of
music. Like the Towers and HMVs of the world, they were large corporate chains with little to differentiate them. But unlike the music-only
megastores, these retailers could afford to sell music at break-even point,
or even as a loss leader, with the assumption that a portion of consumers lured to the store with the promise of $9.99 CDs would end up
splurging on $299.99 stereo systems and $499.99 televisions. The effect,
according to one music chain executive, was like a neutron bomb has
gone off, instantly undermining sales at nearby music-only stores by up
to 50 percent.18
While the lower prices offered by big-box retailers temporarily helped
boost sales volume, they also augured ill for the industry. By the mid1990s, the music specialty stores, forced into a losing price war with Best
Buy and Circuit City, began to see their retail margins erode steeply.
Together with the record labels, which had initially ignored their plight
on the grounds that greater volume meant a better bottom line, they
came up with a plan to stanch the blood flow. In exchange for the labels
financial cooperation in music advertising, retailers would adhere to a
strict minimum advertised pricing (MAP) policyessentially fixing
the price of CDs at a level high enough for the music retailers to retain
some profit.19 This policy lasted from the mid-1990s until 2000, arguably
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n space
Figure 6. Twentieth-century music retail transformation and global music sales revenue.
maintaining an artificially inflated value for the compact disc market beyond its expiration date (fig. 6).
The 1980s90s also saw the emergence of a blockbuster economy in
the music industry, in which an increasing portion of the record labels
fortunes rested in the market performance of a dwindling number of
megastar artists with increasingly short shelf lives. Several factors were
responsible. First, beginning in the late 1970s, major labels entered into
a bidding and poaching war over some of the industrys biggest acts,
inflating the advances paid on royalties to stratospheric heights. James
Taylor, Michael Jackson, and Bruce Springsteen were three of the initial beneficiaries of these deals, which paid them millions of dollars before they had recorded a single note.20 In order to recoup these unprecedented expenses, the labels had to sell an unprecedented number of
units, which meant spending more on marketing and promotion, which
in turn eroded their margins and required a higher volume of sales to
achieve profitability.
This dynamic was compounded by an increasingly concentrated, integrated, and expensive marketing and promotional system. Beginning
with the 1981 launch of MTV, television became a (possibly the) domi102
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nant element in bringing new songs and acts to the publics attention, and
successful artists were increasingly required to be triple threatsgood
musicians, good dancers, and good-looking to bootwhich naturally
depressed the number, range, and diversity of potential pop stars. After
Viacom bought MTV in 1985, it began to expand its music television
offerings rapidly, building or acquiring nearly every major music cable
channel, including VH1, BET, and CMT. With the deregulation of the US
radio industry in the mid-1990s, media conglomerate Clear Channel went
on a buying spree of its own, expanding from the legal maximum of 40
stations in 1996 to over 1,100 by the end of the century. Together, Clear
Channel and Viacom accounted for the majority of the music marketing opportunities on US radio, television, and outdoor media (e.g., billboards), as well as the nations largest events promotion company.
These corporations wielded their consolidated power as a form of
leverage over artists and labels, requiring all-or-nothing commitments to
national tours, marketing, and promotional campaigns (often, all three).
For labels, this dynamic further undermined the value proposition for investing in mid-level artists who may have a loyal following of a few hundred thousand, but would never be able to sell a platinum album or fill
stadiums across the country. It also meant that there was a higher-thanever risk associated with artist development; beginning in this period, if
an artist didnt have a hit with his or her first radio single, a full album
could very well never be released. Gone were the days when artists like
Bob Dylan or Simon & Garfunkel could struggle through a few albums
worth of obscurity before hitting it big.
Naturally, the rise of the blockbuster economy could be heard aesthetically in the music itself, which had to aim for larger audiences, often
sacrificing depth of resonance for breadth of appeal. One example of this
trend was the emergence of boy bands such as New Kids on the Block,
the Backstreet Boys, and N Sync. With their youthful bravado, carefully
coiffed images, and even more polished sound, these groups were ideal
vehicles to sell a few platinum albums, sell out a few tours, unload a
ton of merchandise, and then put out to pasture (or, on rare occasion,
develop into successful solo acts). If many of these groups sounded the
same, it was often because much of the music was written and produced
by the same people. Labels and artists during this time increasingly came
to rely on the pop expertise of a handful of super producers such as
Max Martin, Rami Yacoub, and Rodney Jerkins,21 who developed consistent songwriting and studio techniques that could be applied to any
popular artist of the day.
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The true value of such producers to the music industry is reflected

in their economic remuneration; while most major label artists wait a
lifetime without ever seeing a royalty check, successful producers typically receive high production fees plus royalties on sale, without having
to wait for the labels to recoup their expenses. In fact, in many cases, the
producers cut is paid out of the artists piece of the pie, rather than the
labelsmeaning that the more expensive a producer is, the smaller the
chance is that the artist will ever earn a dime.
Despite the many business risks of the blockbuster economy (greater
upfront expense, less diversified risk, lower customer loyalty, slimmer
margins), its short-term effect was to increase record sales volume, and
therefore revenue. Thus, while only two of the top-selling albums of all
time, according to the RIAA, were produced between 1990 and 2000,22
suggesting that the artists promoted during this period tended to lack
the longevity of those from earlier eras, eight of the seventeen albums
to surpass one million copies sold in a single week were released during
this period, and the Backstreet Boys, N Sync, and Britney Spears were
the third, fourth, and fifth to achieve this milestone, respectively.23
The final element of the music industrys perfect bubble was an
excellent economy. The decade between March 1991 and March 2001
Figure 7. Global music sales and US economic expansion and recession, 19692011.
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was characterized by a consistent economic expansion unprecedented

in American history.24 This had a direct impact on the ability of consumers to purchase music products, as it was characterized by a similar
expansion in median household income25 (fig. 7). Meanwhile, following
the end of the Cold War and other geopolitical changes of the era, new
global markets emerged, increasing worldwide demand for entertainment industry products. This buoyed the creative economy as a whole;
according to research published by the United Nations, creative exports
nearly doubled from $227.5 billion in 1996 to $424.4 billion in 2005.26
To summarize, the last decade and a half of the twentieth centurya
period during which the global music sales market grew to more than
three times its former sizeamounted to a perfect bubble for the recording industry. Between the ascendance of the CD format, the evolution of
the music retail market, the rise of the blockbuster model, the consolidation of broadcasting, and the unprecedented expansion of the US and
global economies, it is little surprise that the market fared so well. Yet
in many of these factors, short-term success was paired with long-term
instability. All bubbles eventually pop, and the music retail market was
no different in this respect. The perfect storm that ensued was complex, severe, and had very little to do with P2P or any form of piracy
by music fans.
The Perfect Storm: 20002011

The year 2000 marked a turning point for the music industry; on this
much, everyone can agree. Sales began to descend from the heights
reached between 1995 and 1999, with a rapidity that justifiably alarmed
artists and labels alike. With very few exceptions, each year since then
has marked a continuation of this dismal trend, and by 2011, global sales
amounted to only about 68 percent of what they had been a decade
earlier. While these losses were mitigated to a degree by the rise of new
revenue models and sources (as I discussed in the previous chapter),
music sales remain the bread and butter for record labels, and, accurately or not, are seen as a barometer of the broader industrys overall
health.
One of the most important factors underpinning these changes is a
profound shift in consumer psychology. The recording industry tends to
promote a simplified version of this process, arguing that, in the wake of
P2P and other forms of sharing, consumers have come to simply believe
that online music, books and movies should be free.27 Yet the major
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labels have, on occasion, acknowledged that theres more to the story

than mere freeloading. As the EMI owner Terra Firma Capital explained
in its 2008 Annual Review, the labels revenue had been declining due
to the structural shift in the consumer music market and to a slow response, both by the industry and the company, to the move towards
digital consumption. . . . This shift has been particularly detrimental to
the consumer-facing Recorded Music business.28
What does this structural shift in the consumer market consist of?
We can understand it in the same terms that apply to any vibrant and
competitive marketplace: convenience, quality, and value. Digital music
provided fans with an unprecedented degree of choice over the mode,
method and context of music consumption, control over their music
listening experiences, volume of content to choose from, and portability
in their music-listening venues. Whereas physical music formats such
as LPs, cassettes, and CDs required consumers to carry around a bulky
plastic object in order to listen to ten or fifteen songs by a given artist
in a predetermined order, MP3s and Internet streaming enabled them
to compile their own tailored listening experiences, suited to their individual preferences, habits, time frames, and locations.
Once this shift occurred in consumers behavior and psychology, they
could no longer recognize the same use value in the CD format, and
were therefore unwilling to accord it the same degree of market value.
This process was accelerated by the massive distribution and adoption of
CD ripping and burning technologies (some of which are created and
manufactured by parents and affiliates of the record labels themselves,
for example, Sony), which took place independently of online sharing
activity. Moreover, as the Terra Firma report acknowledges, the labels
themselves can be faulted for taking a decade to absorb the significance
of this shift in market demand (despite early research published by me
and others), and for failing to accommodate it sooner, despite the existence of willing retailers, distributors, service and technology providers,
and, of course, consumers. To put it simply, the recording industry has
always benefited economically from promoting consumer adoption of
new music distribution formats; in the case of digital music, it chose to
ignore and fight the new format instead, and lost out on the potential
rewards.
This failure on the industrys part to exploit new digital technologies
and modes of consumption dovetailed with the end of the CD replacement cycle (see fig. 5). By 2000, nearly every Beatles fan in the world
owned the White Album on CD, and yet it wasnt until late 2010 that
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this classic recording finally appeared on iTunes, available for legal download for the first time ever.29 Naturally, music sales lagged during this
interim. And again, despite the prevalence of the P2P killed music narrative, major labels have occasionally acknowledged the role that format
replacement plays in maintaining and growing their market size. Warner
Music Group (WMG) has been one of the most vocal labels on this subject, consistently acknowledging in its public filings between 2006 and
2010 that negative growth rates on a global basis can be attributed in
part to the fact that the period of growth in recorded music sales driven
by the introduction and penetration of the CD format has ended.30 Lyor
Cohen, then WMGs North American chief executive, acknowledged
this fact as well, calling the end of the CD replacement cycle the biggest challenge facing the company in the early years of the twenty-first
century. In a 2006 interview with the Los Angeles Times, he argued that
Warners infrastructure was way too expensive. Throughout the
1980s and early 90s, the success of the compact disc format allowed
music companies to build enormous, expensive staffs. When the
industry began to decline in the late 1990s, most companies decided
that rather than cut staff, they would take shortcuts to sell more
records. Thats why Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and NSync
appeared, because labels had to find huge pop hits to pay for their
staffs, no matter how short-lived those hits were.31
This exceptional candor on Cohens part suggests another important

factor affecting music sales at the turn of the century: the waning of the
blockbuster economy and the collapse of the boy band/pop aesthetic.
The same blockbuster processes that contributed to an inflation of the
music market in the 1990s undermined its value a decade later: by cutting
down on aesthetic diversity, the labels put too many of their eggs into a
single basket. P2P, and other forms of digital music, played a role here.
While music promotion and distribution channels were highly concentrated in the 1990s, it was unnecessary for labels to diversify their offerings, and unlikely that most consumers would develop the expectation of
greater variety. But as innovations like MP3, portable digital devices, and
streaming music gained widespread market traction, music fans began
to experience the long tail32 through metaphors like custom radio,
playlists, and shuffle, listening to a wider range of musical styles in a
broader array of contexts. By the same token, the promotional stranglehold maintained by the monolithic gatekeepers of radio and television
was loosening thanks to the growing popularity of independent online
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music sites and services, both licensed and unlicensed. By the mid-2000s,
there was neither the economic necessity nor the market demand for
the kinds of blockbuster acts the recording industry had emphasized in
the 1990s. Yet the labels were essentially stuck with this model, having jettisoned both the artists and the infrastructure to accommodate
smaller, more targeted markets. As a result of this mismatch between
the expectations of music buyers and the capacities of music sellers, the
market suffered.
Another major factor in the contraction of the global music market
was the unbundling of songs. As I discussed in chapter 2, the introduction of the LP vinyl music format after World War II contributed to
the ascendance of a new product categorythe albumin which songs
were bundled together and essentially sold at a discount relative to their
aggregate price. By the 1960s, the album had become more than just
an economic and technological convenience: it had become the dominant paradigm through which recording artists and their fans communicated. Programmatic recordings like the Beach Boys Pet Sounds (1966)
and the Beatles Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) conceived of
the album as a contiguous suite of interrelated songs, rather than a more
or less random assortment of radio hits. Increasingly elaborate and welldesigned album cover art and packaging helped to communicate this aesthetic to fans, and to establish a sense of the work as a discrete category.
Yet not every album was like Pet Sounds. A significant portion of
album releases continued to contain mostly filler material punctuated
by a handful of hits. This was an economic calculation on the music
industrys part, tailored to make consumers pay more relative to the
number of songs they genuinely wanted to hear, and it inflated the value
of the music retail industry above the level of actual demand. As iTunes,
Amazon, and other retailers began to offer digital singles in the 2000s,
and as iPods and other new digital music players offered fans the ability
to create their own playlists and to listen in shuffle mode, consumers
began to spend their money more strategically, purchasing only the individual songs they wanted to hear. Naturally, this deflated the music retail
market by cutting out the portion spent on filler. As Bob Pittman, the
cofounder of MTV, former AOL Time Warner COO, and current Clear
Channel CEO, acknowledged a few years ago, the reversion to digital
singles as the dominant sales format has had a far more ruinous effect
on record industry revenues than file sharing has. In Pittmans words,
Stealing music is not [whats] killing music. . . . When I talk to people in
the music business, most of them will admit the problem is theyre sell108
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Figure 8. Twenty-first-century music retail transformation and global music sales revenue.
ing songs and not albums. I mean, you do the math.33 After doing the
math, the Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse concurred
with Pittman, concluding that it is indeed a significant factor in decreased
sales revenues: I find strong support for the hypothesis that revenues
for [albums] substantially decrease as music is increasingly consumed
digitally. While the demand for individual songs is growing at a faster
rate than the demand for albums is declining, the dollar amounts gained
through new song sales remain far below the level needed to offset the
revenues lost due to lower album sales.34
Sales have also declined over the past decade as a result of the continuing evolution of the music retail sector. Beginning in the mid-1990s, as
I mentioned above, MAP pricing schemes artificially sustained the sales
priceand therefore the aggregate sales valueof CDs. This practice
ended abruptly in 2000, when attorneys general from forty-three states
launched an investigation into its potential anti-competitive implications
(fig. 8). Two years later, the suit against the labels was settled for $143
million in cash and donations, with no admission of wrongdoing by the
labels. However, thenattorney general of New York Eliot Spitzer announced that the agreement was a landmark settlement to address years
BUBBLES AND STORMS
109
of illegal price-fixing. In the eyes of regulators, there was little question

that this scheme had impacted music spending. In fact, Robert Pitofsky,
former chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, estimated that consumers had overpaid roughly a half billion dollars for music during the
half decade that MAP was in place.35
With the end of MAP, CD price points plummeted in the United
States, and so did retail margins. This decline happened at just the moment when real estate costs began their greatest climb in American history, causing home values to double in less than a decade,36 and as retail
space underwent a similar escalation in cost. Big-box stores like Walmart
and Best Buy could absorb these losses, but music specialty chains began
to turn belly-up. HMV scaled back its operations, closing its last American
store in 2004. Tower Records and the Musicland Group (owner of Sam
Goody) both filed for bankruptcy in 2006. In 2007, Virgin Group sold its
North American megastore business to a real estate conglomerate, which
then decided to close every store.
These closures had a profound effect on the music retail market, beyond the mere loss of brick-and-mortar square footage. By 2003, owing
in large part to its massive, post-MAP discounts on CDs, Walmart had
become the top music seller in the world. Yet, because its focus was solely
on bringing in foot traffic, its music selection was far more limited than
those of Tower or HMV. Why waste valuable shelf space on niche
music when Shania Twain marked down to $9.99 is all you need to bring
in hordes of potential big-ticket shoppers? As the music chains disappeared, so did the music from off the beaten track and below the Top 40.
This inevitably undermined music sales overall; although popular music
is, by definition, the most popular, independent record labels have historically made up at least 20 percent of the marketplace, and major label
back catalog (typically older releases and former hits) made up about
3040 percent of the remaining sales. In other words, by 2003, the worlds
biggest music retailers were selling only a tiny fraction of the commercial
music library, and even the popular titles they did carry addressed only
about half of total market demand in terms of volume.
This winnowing of the brick-and-mortar music selection didnt sit
well with music buyers. Some shifted their purchases to online CD retailers like Amazon, which had (virtually) infinite shelf space and therefore a broader range of music for sale. Others began to buy their music
from digital retailers such as iTunes (which was still burdened by the
yoke of DRM). And others shifted their music discovery and acquisition
onto online sharing platforms like P2P, or streaming platforms such as
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Pandora. As real estate prices continued to climb and consumers became

more comfortable with buying their music online, this process began to
accelerate. By the end of the decade, big-box retailers had scaled back
their already limited music shelf space to make way for other low-consideration entertainment goods (such as movies and games), while iTunes
surpassed Walmart as the worlds top music seller in 2008. Given that
digital goods tend to have a lower retail margin than physical ones, in
addition to the unbundling process, this change, like each new development in music retail over the past fifteen years, only further undermined
the total value of the music retail market.
There has also been a less quantifiable, but in many ways far more
valuable, casualty: the sense of localized music community, best represented by independent record stores and celebrated in books such as
Nick Hornbys High Fidelity and films such as Empire Records. This community has been slowly eroding ever since the mom-and-pop shops
came under siege in the 1970s, but the total commoditization of music
at the hands of Walmart and its consequent dematerialization in the
digital ether were the final nails in the coffin. There are many social and
cultural benefits that accrue from online music sharing, but none of them
can exactly replace whats been lost.
Despite the death of the mom-and-pop shop, the digital age has been
a massive boon to the sale of used and independently distributed music
neither of which appears in the IFPIs market figures (because they dont
generate revenue for the member labels). These markets have never been
conclusively measured, to my knowledge. There is compelling evidence,
however, that both have grown significantly in the past decade, competing with RIAA and IFPI constituent recordings for consumer music expenditures. According to a 2007 Billboard article, for instance, the market
for used recordings may have doubled or even quadrupled during the
early years of the new century. Among the retailers they interviewed,
used CD sales have grown from about 5 percent to sometimes 1020
percent of overall CD revenues.37 While this may be a relatively shortterm phenomenon, a self-limited consequence of the commoditization
of CDs and the shift of the marketplace to digital distribution, the same
cant be said for independently distributed music, which has no reason
to halt its ascent.
For one thing, theres simply more of it. With cheap music production
tools such as Apples GarageBand, as well as thousands of free and opensource audio production programs, the sheer volume of independently
produced music has escalated dramatically over the past decade. A recent
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111
report by media researchers Michael Masnick and Michael Ho shows that

the music metadata company Gracenote has increased its database of
recorded music tenfold in the new century, from eleven million songs in
2001 to over a hundred million in 2010.38 Although not all of these new
entries are necessarily newly released, they largely represent songs that
are newly available in the marketplace. For another thing, long tail
economics have leveled the playing field somewhat, allowing independent music to share virtual shelf space with the biggest sellers on iTunes,
Amazon, and Spotify.
Its impossible to quantify the total size of the independently distributed music market, but there are some market indicators that suggest
its size is growing significantly. First of all, independent music isnt just
available on digital music servicespeople actually listen to, stream,
download, and purchase it. Chris Anderson showed this to be the case in
his book The Long Tail, in which he demonstrated that 45 percent of sales
revenue at the digital music seller Rhapsody could be accounted for by
products not available in [the] largest offline retail stores.39 Similarly,
Pandora founder Tim Westergren recently testified before Congress that
70 percent of the artists whose music is played on the digital radio provider (generating performance royalties) are independent.40 We can also
see hints of this markets size by looking at individual aggregators of
independent music. CD Baby, a rapidly growing company that sells over
four million songs by more than three hundred thousand independent
musicians, reports on its website that it has paid out over $250 million to
its artists to date,41 suggesting a retail value in the range of $350 million.
Similarly, the independent digital music distributor TuneCore, founded
in 2005, currently accounts for about one-tenth of the songsand 4 percent of the revenueson iTunes, or about $70 million annually from
that source alone. According to its founder, Jeff Price, as of mid-2012 the
company had already paid over $300 million in royalties to its member
artists.42 Likewise, as mentioned, the crowdfunding company Kickstarter
raised $35 million for independent musicians in 2012, and Bandcamp
.com is generating roughly $1 million per month in artist revenues. In
short, there are hundreds of millionsor even billionsof dollars spent
on music purchases each year that dont figure into the IFPIs official
tally, and this number appears to be increasing sharply. At least a portion
of these expenditures are doubtless responsible for diminishing major
label music sales through competition.
Finally, just as the booming economy of the 1990s inflated the value of
music sales during that period, the sagging economy in the twenty-first
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century has deflated the market, a factor exacerbated by increased competition for consumer discretionary spending from the growing sectors
of home video, video games, Internet access, and mobile applications.43
After a decade of unprecedented expansion, the US economy suffered
two major recessions in the course of a decade, while median household
income dropped from its historic peak (see fig. 7). Although these factors
arent typically acknowledged by piracy crusaders seeking to place most
or all of the blame for their misfortunes on P2P and online music sharing,
the major labels have occasionally acknowledged that their market, like
any, is subject to the vagaries of the global economy. Predictably, this has
happened more frequently in the discussion of good news than bad. For
instance, in a 2005 press release, the IFPI acknowledged that improvements in the music economy over the past year had been due in part to
economic strength and strong releases help[ing] CD volume growth.44
In short, we cannot blame P2Por any single factorfor the heavy
decline in global music sales over the past decade. However convenient
it may be to scapegoat online music fans for the industrys woes, the
preponderance of evidence points to a far more complex, and interesting,
picture. If piracy played a role at all, it was likely in the form of massive
commercial CD duplication (primarily in emerging markets), which according to the IFPI has grown from roughly 165 million units in 200045
to 1.1 billion units in 2008, accounting for $4.6 billion in sales that year.46
Nor are the many factors of the music industrys perfect storm discrete.
We cant confidently ascribe 10 percent of the market contraction to one
and 20 percent to another. To the contrary, they are deeply interrelated;
the bad economy helped to drive the housing bubble, which helped to
push brick-and-mortar retailers out of business, which helped drive consumers to digital goods, which accelerated the unbundling process, and
so forth. At the end of the day, all we can say is that these many factors,
taken in aggregate, represent the conclusion of an economic cycle for
the music industry, and inaugurate another, with its own threats and
opportunities.
Mommy, Where Do Piracy Loss Estimates Come From?

I have spent the bulk of the last two chapters deconstructing myths
about piracyspecifically, the crusaders claims that online music
sharing is antagonistic to musical culture and industry, and the major
labels attempts to pin the blame for recent sales declines on P2P. Before
I conclude this chapter, there is another myth that must be addressed:
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namely, oft-quoted figures purporting to tally the total economic impact

of digital piracy, in terms of both lost revenues and lost jobs. Nor is the
music industry solely responsible for this myth; similar claims have been
made by the film industry and the software industry, who often partner
with the IFPI and the RIAA to lobby for stricter copyright, surveillance
and censorship laws, and in their legal and extralegal efforts to shut
down unlicensed content distribution and punish those responsible.
The news media, government reports, and scholarly articles are rife
with quantitative estimates of the economic impact of unlicensed goods
and content, most of them attributed to seemingly reputable sources,
including trade groups, government departments, commercial research
firms, and academic researchers. The most commonly repeated claims
are those that the US Chamber of Commerce (USCC) has promoted on
its website at least since 2007, namely that counterfeiting and piracy
costs the US between $200250 billion in lost sales each year [and] have
resulted in the loss of 750,000 jobs in the United States.47 More recently,
the USCC has commissioned a research report by self-described brand
protection company MarkMonitor, which finds (unsurprisingly) that
the worldwide economic impact of online piracy and counterfeiting
amounts to $200 billion annually.48 It is not clear from either organizations publications whether this staggering online problem is a very
large subset of, or an addition to, the $200250 billion in annual costs the
USCC had previously ascribed to piracy in general. If the former (which
seems more likely), it doesnt leave much room for the economic impact
of off-line piracy.
Elsewhere, the USCC cites a different study, authored by research firm
Frontier Economics and commissioned by the International Chamber
of Commerce (ICC), which found that approximately 2.5 million jobs
[annually] have been destroyed by counterfeiting and piracy. This report also claims that the global economic value of counterfeited and
pirated products was $650 billion in 2008, and is expected to grow to
about $1.2 trillion by 2015. The portion of this figure ascribed specifically
to music digital piracy was between $17 billion and $40 billion in 2008,
and was most likely closer to $40 billion.49 In other words, according to
the ICC, the value of music piracy actually significantly exceeds the value
of the entire recorded music industry.
The ICC report itself takes some pains to explain that the music industry hasnt actually lost more to piracy than it earns. The authors
emphasize that their figures provide an estimate of the total value of
unlicensed digital files available on line [but] are not an estimate of the
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business losses associated with digital piracy, and should not be interpreted
as doing so,50 explaining that such losses would be methodologically impossible to capture. Predictably, these numbers have been consistently
misinterpreted in exactly the way the reports authors warn against.
For instance, US Senator Chuck Grassley recently gave a statement at a
Senate hearing on intellectual property claiming that the global impact
of counterfeiting and piracy is $650 billionin other words, painting
this figure as representative of costs, rather than value. Even the USCC
has misrepresented the ICCs findings, citing the report on its website to
support the disingenuous claim that counterfeit and pirated products
account for $360 billion in losses in international trade annually.51 (This
is actually the figure the ICC report describes as the maximal value of
internationally traded counterfeit and pirated products, a subcomponent
of their $650 billion estimate).
Other figures abound as well. For instance, The Institute for Policy
Innovation, an archconservative think tank founded by US Congressman Dick Armey, still prominently promotes a 2007 report it published
called The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy to the U.S. Economy.
According to this report, the U.S. economy loses $12.5 billion in total
output annually (or nearly half of the global recorded music industrys
total sales) due to piracy of sound recordings.52 The report, which was
authored by an economist who, according to his bio, has been instrumental in furthering the global efforts of the World Intellectual Property
Organization,53 also claims that Americans lose over 71,000 jobs annually from music piracy. This number is difficult to reconcile with RIAA
chief executive Cary Shermans claim that direct employment in the
industry has fallen by only about 10,000 in the past 13 years,54 or with a
new report from the International Intellectual Property Alliance (IIPA),55
penned by the same author as the IPIs, which claims that the core copyright industries (defined as music, filmed entertainment, software and
publishing) only lost a total of 4,000 jobs between 2007 and 2011.56 Yet
the IPIs report has been widely repeated without critique in the press,
and is called a credible study on the RIAAs own website.57
Despite the consistency with which these contradictory and often illogical figures get repeated in the press and elsewhere, I am hardly the
first researcher to call the various claims of piracys economic impact into
question. Ars Technica journalist Julian Sanchez published an in-depth
investigative piece in 2008, concluding that the $250 billion and 750,000
jobs figures promoted by the USCC are at best, highly dubious. They
are phantoms. We have no good reason to think that either is remotely
BUBBLES AND STORMS
115
reliable. He also points out that, despite recent reports apparently validating these numbers, they are both seemingly decades old, gaining a
patina of currency and credibility by virtue of being laundered through
a relay race of respectable sources. Apparently, they have no foundation whatsoever in concrete economic analysis. When he contacted the
government agencies which ostensibly served as the sources of the dollar
figure, for instance, he was told that they couldnt find any record of
how that number was computed.58 Sanchez has revisited this subject
over the years; in an extensive blog post for the Cato Institute in 2012
titled How Copyright Industries Con Congress, he connects the dots
between research and policy, demonstrating that his phantom numbers were a central element in the recent efforts to legislate Internet
censorship via the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA).59
The US Government Accountability Office (GAO) has also taken pains
to identify the sources of many of these figures, pursuant to the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act,
which was signed into law in 2008. Interestingly, the GAOs findings
were somewhat at odds with the rhetoric of the laws proponents. Specifically, the authors found that [t]hree widely cited U.S. government
estimates of economic losses resulting from counterfeiting [including the
$200250 billion figure cited by the USCC] cannot be substantiated due
to the absence of underlying studies. Even further, the report conceded
that any such figures cited in any context are most likely spurious, given
that it is difficult, if not impossible, to quantify the economy-wide impacts of piracy.60
Ultimately, then, the entire case for the economic impact of digital
piracy is a castle built on quicksandor perhaps a more apt metaphor
would be the mythical Ouroboros, a snake that devours its own tail. A
lobbyist (RIAA) aims to amplify its credibility by citing a study produced
by an independent consultancy (Frontier Economics) and funded by the
International Chamber of Commerce.61 Frontiers study repeatedly explains that it is building on the OECD methodology and building on
the OECDs work,62 thereby increasing its own credibility by resting
its case on the findings of a multigovernmental economic organization.
The OECD, in turn, gains credibility by basing its analysis in part on figures sourced to government agenciesspecifically, the US Federal Trade
Commission (FTC). The US governments own Accountability Office
investigates these figures and finds that FTC officials were unable to
locate any record or source of this estimate within its reports or archives,
and officials could not recall the agency ever developing or using this esti116
CHAPTER 5
mate.63 Yet, regardless of this fundamental absence of substantiation, the

RIAA successfully lobbies Congress, the White House, and international
treaty organizations to aggressively promote legislation based on their
claims, and to police, arrest and punish those allegedly responsible for the
phantom damages. Dissenting voices are systematically excluded from
the debate and erased from the news coverage. The cycle, unchecked,
repeats itself ad nauseam.
AS I HAVE argued in this chapter, most of the claims underpinning
the piracy crusade have little or no basis in reality. The music industry
has indeed undergone a radical economic transformation since the turn
of the century, but to the extent that P2P and online music sharing played
any role, it was minimal, and cant reasonably be said to have caused
the entire enormous decline, as Liebowitz and his sponsors at the
RIAA have claimed. The industry, which was buoyed to unprecedented
heights by a perfect bubble in the 1990s, shrank again a decade later,
due to a perfect storm exacerbated by the recording industrys own
self-admitted failure to adequately provide their consumers with a functional digital music market.
The industrys quantitative assessments of market harm from P2P and
other forms of digital piracy, though widely repeated, have little or no
basis in fact, and analysis by the federal government has debunked some
of the claims that are integral to its own trade and copyright policies. In
fact, according to the IIPAs own recent analysis, value added to the US
economy by the core copyright industries increased by $27.5 billion,
and the sector itself grew by 1.1 percent annually in real value, between
2007 and 2010. With these metrics, according to their 2011 report, the
U.S. copyright industries have consistently outperformed the rest of the
U.S. economy in recent years.64 These findings seem fundamentally irreconcilable with claims of large-scale damages due to piracy, especially
considering that file sharing traffic has continued to grow, and is projected to nearly triple between 2010 and 2015, according to analysis by
research firm GigaOM.65
Despite (or because of) the continued growth of online music sharing,
there is significant reason to believe that the music industry economy is
beginning to stabilize, which would make the perfect storm years of
20002011 seem transitional in retrospect. Not only is the rate of decline
in global music sales slowing considerably (in fact, the market grew in
the US and elsewhere in 2011, and preliminary data show US music unit
sales volume at an all time high in 2012), but the labels and publishers
BUBBLES AND STORMS
117
have finally begun to license their content for use in innovative new
business models premised on abundance rather than scarcity, such as
Spotify and iTunes Match, offering the prospect of higher revenuesand
higher customer satisfactionthan the sales of a la carte digital singles
alone could accomplish. To put it another way, the industry appears to
be recognizing that its market has transformed, and is applying genuine
efforts toward meeting its consumers halfway.
We are not out of the woods yet, however. Labels are still more likely
to litigate than to license when confronted by a genuinely innovative
music distribution platform, and theres the minor matter of a decade
of lost opportunities and ill will to overcome. In my next chapter, I will
discuss the recording industrys lingering goodwill problem and continuing strategic missteps, and discuss the extent to which its piracy crusade
has exacerbated these problems.
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CHAPTER 5
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CHAPTER 6
Is the Music Industry Its

Own Worst Enemy?
IN 1896, the British House of Lords adjudicated Trego vs. Hunt,
a suit involving two business partners who had parted ways, Hunt selling his share to Trego. After pocketing Tregos money, Hunt hired a
clerk to copy down all the names and addresses of the firms clients, so
he could start a new business and poach them. Ultimately, Hunt was
found to be in the wrong, the reason being that when he sold his share
of the company, he had also given up his rights to the goodwillthe
business reputation and customer relationsthat went along with it. As
Lord MacNaghten, one of the adjudicators, reasoned: Often it happens
that Goodwill is the very sap and life of the business, without which it
would yield little or no fruit. It is the whole advantage, whatever it may
be, of the reputation and connection of the firm, which may have been
built up by years of honest work, or gained by lavish expenditure of
money.1
Much in culture, law, and finance has changed since the late nineteenth century, but goodwill remains the very sap and life of business,
and, if anything, has become only more vital in our brand-driven, mediasaturated information economy. Today, goodwill is a standard element
of business accounting and formally refers to the intangible reputational
factors that increase a companys value above the book value of its
identifiable or physical assets.2 Although there are established methods
for valuing goodwill (and its loss, or impairment), this process is still
considered by many finance professionals to be more art than science.3
Because of its heavy reliance on marketing and promotion (lavish
expenditure of money), as well as its extensive business-to-business dealings (years of honest work), goodwill is even more important in music
than in most other fields. The authors of the industry bible, This Business
119
of Music, declared, One cannot overemphasize the value of names in the

music industry, [and] the goodwill attached to names in the music business is even more important in music industry circles [than among consumers].4 Naturally, then, any impairment or tarnishing of the major
labels brands and reputations is a serious threat to their market value
and to their ability to do business (according to recent analysis by Echo
Research, the average company can attribute 26 percent of its market
cap to its reputation).5
Has the music industry lost goodwill in recent years? Its an interesting question, and even the major labels themselves dont seem sure of
the answer. Warner Music Group, which was a publicly traded company
from 2004 to 2011, was required to disclose any goodwill impairment in
its public financial filings during that time period. According to its annual
reports (form 10-K), the results of its own tests showed that no impairment occurred in 2008, 2009, or 2010. Yet when the IFPIof which
Warner is a constituent membersued The Pirate Bay torrent tracker in
2009, it specifically claimed that the damages sought should cover not
only record sales lost to the Pirate Bay, but the loss of goodwill and other
harm caused by file sharing.6 In other words, the major labels were
suing for the damage done to their goodwill by P2P despite claiming no
such damage in their official accounting records.
A clue that the recording industry has, in fact, suffered from some
goodwill impairment came in 2007, when the RIAA was voted the worst
company in America by readers of popular blog The Consumerist, consigning the previous years winner, Halliburton, to second place.7 Thus,
I tend to agree with the IFPI that there has been substantial damage to
the industrys brands and business reputation, but differ when it comes to
the cause. Far from blaming file sharing services or their users, I believe
the industry itself is largely the engineer of its own reputational misfortunes. To the extent that P2P or digital technology in general have played
a role in the process, it is only by (a) providing consumers, artists, and
innovators with an alternative to the industrys historically cartelized distribution practices and therefore bringing the fundamental unfairness of
those practices into sharp relief, and (b) providing a target for the music
industrys ruinous piracy crusade, which has engendered an unyielding
torrent of public relations debacles since the turn of the century. Additionally, the industrys continuing strategic failure to develop a proactive
digital business model (as I discussed in chapter 3) has undermined its
credibility among potential partners and investors, further diminishing
whatever goodwill remains.
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CHAPTER 6
The Industrys Chickens Come Home to Roost

This is hardly the first era in which the music industrys reputation has
been challenged. The payola scandals of the 1950s and 2000s suggested
to many observers that the industry was more concerned with raking in
profits than with releasing good music. The 1985 Senate hearings on profanity in popular music spurred nationwide hand wringing over the nefarious effects of heavy metal (and other forms of audio pornography)
on Americas youth. Sensationalistic challenges to religious authority by
Madonna, Sinad OConnor, and other performers and the association
of underworld violence with gangsta rap sent god-fearing, law-abiding
citizens into apoplexies during the 1990s. In every era, it seems, the industry has struggled to keep its nose clean, barely skirting the edge of
propriety and keeping only one step ahead of the proverbial torches and
pitchforks.
Given this colorful history, it would be tempting to see any current
challenges to the music industrys goodwill as simply another iteration
of a well-established pattern. Yet there is something distinct about the
industrys present reputational straits. In the past, its primary critics and
detractors tended to fall into two (somewhat overlapping) categories:
social conservatives opposed to the sex/violence/permissiveness exhibited and championed by youth-oriented musical genres like rock and rap,
and high culture types like Theodor Adorno,8 concerned that popular
music was junk food for the soul and corrosive to the political process.
Even the payola scandals, which were technically about unethical market
manipulation, were initially spurred by concerns about the role of rock
music in promoting racial integration and otherwise undermining the
foundations of white American hegemony.9 In nearly every case, the
music industry was able to turn the outrage to its advantage, developing
a romantic aura of danger and mystique, and a reputation as a boundarypushing force for social change, in cahoots with the youth, the artists, and
the revolutionaries of the world.
By contrast, the music industry today faces its greatest criticism from
its former allies: its own artists, business partners, and consumers. Ironically, its staunchest supporters today are government regulators (instead
of holding investigative hearings, for instance, Congress now promotes
legislation aimed at granting the industry ever-greater power), and its
chief allies include religious groups, police organizations, and conservative social and political advocates.10 What accounts for this sudden shift
in polarity? How did the music industry lose its mojo and its cred, and
IS THE MUSIC INDUSTRY ITS OWN WORST ENEMY?
121
why does it seem to have become the very image of its putative nemesis,
what in the counterculture era it would have called The Man? The
answer has little to do with some foundational shift in industry ethics
or practices and can be better understood as a powerful cartels longwandering chickens coming home to roost.
First of all, the music industry has a history of unfair and exploitative
labor practices. In addition to the legislative and contractual wrangling I
described earlier, the major labels have often reached beyond the liberal
scope of their allotted power, violating the terms of their own contracts
and functionally robbing their artists of their entitled dues. For instance, a
recent legal suit brought by country music legend Kenny Rogers against
Capitol Records11 offers a litany of alleged violations, including
taking two years to respond to an audit request
refusing to account for, or pay a share of, the substantial fees
collected in lawsuits against P2P companies such as Napster,
Kazaa, and Grokster
holding over $76,000 in unprocessed royalties in a suspense file
with no apparent right or cause
non-payment of royalties from sales of music via record clubs
non-payment of royalties on free goods distributed overseas, in
violation of Rogerss contract
inconsistent documentation, in that some accounts showed earnings for certain albums in certain periods, but other accounts . . .
failed to reflect those earnings
withholding foreign taxes even though they were offset by tax credits
incorrect royalty rate calculation in some foreign territories
charging over $12,000 to Rogers without any explanation of those
charges
charging Rogers 100% of video production costs, even though his
contract stipulated a 50% charge
failing to account for or pay royalties based on radio performance
royalties12
paying Rogers a far lower royalty than his contract required for nondisc records such as digital downloads and ringtones
failing to remedy any of these oversights financially once the audit
had revealed them
True, these are alleged wrongs in a legal complaint, but they are consistent with those described in other recent lawsuits and with widespread
criticisms from artist advocates over several decades. (The University of
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Ottawa law professor Michael Geist, quoting another lawsuit brought

by artists against major labels alleging $6 billion in damages by the labels,
attributes what he calls their rampant infringement to a routine policy
of exploit now, pay later if at all.)13 And if these are the kinds of liberties
major record labels are willing to take with the accounts of popular, established acts such as Kenny Rogers, it seems likely that less experienced
or less powerful artists are apt to be exploited to an even greater degree
and have less recourse. Indeed, chroniclers of African American musical
culture have observed in depth the degrees to which the music industry
has systematically denied black musicians an ownership stakeor even a
living wagefor the profound range of musics they have contributed to
the marketplace, from ragtime to rap and beyond.14 As Q-Tip rapped in
A Tribe Called Quests classic 1991 song Check the Rhime: Industry
rule number four thousand and eighty / Record company people are
shady.
In addition to its exploitative labor relations, the music industry has
also historically had problematic dealings with its partners and competitors, and has consistently been accused, and at times convicted, of anticompetitive, collusive, coercive, or dishonest relations with other firms
and organizations. As I discussed in chapter 1, this predates the recorded
music industry; as early as the mid-nineteenth century, the largest American music publishers colluded to set prices for printed scores. Since then,
virtually every consolidated sector of the industry, from broadcasters15 to
radio promoters16 to event promoters17 to television networks18 to music
retailers19 to the major labels,20 has conformed to this pattern, facing lawsuits, government investigations, and regulatory actions aimed at curtailing such behaviors or even dismantling the cartels. By the turn of
the twenty-first century, the music industry rested on an uneasy dtente
between these highly concentrated, deeply interdependent oligarchies
(in the words of the veteran pop guitarist and author Steve Lukather, it
was, at this point, the most corrupt businessnext to politicsin the
world).21
The third area in which the music industry has historically undermined
its goodwill is in its relations with its consumers. Price-fixing of musical
scores and CDs continued into the digital age, with the launch of the
major labelowned, DRM-backed digital music subscription initiatives
MusicNet and PressPlay in 2001, which required consumers to pay $240
per yearfar more than the median music buyer typically spentjust to
listen to digital music from all five major labels.22 The US Department
of Justice soon investigated these services for potential anticompetitive
123
practices,23 and at the time of writing, there is still a pending antitrust

suit24 against the majors for their involvement in these businesses (the US
Supreme Court declined to hear an appeal by the labels in 2011). Another
practice that engendered some bad blood was the recording industrys
effort to phase out the single format while injecting the typical albumlength release with more filler than hits. This widely recognized practice
(Billboard once reviewed an album as remarkably filler-free)25 was an affront to consumers, who were forced to pay for several songs they didnt
want in order to own the two or three they actually cared about. Numerous other examples could be cited, from the FTC-investigated negative option billing practices26 used by label-run record clubs to the selfscalping, service charges, and other methods by which music event ticket
prices have been jacked up over the years.27 A full accounting could easily
fill a chapter on its own; suffice it to say that the music industry has historically overcharged and under-delivered for its own consumers, across
a range of products and sectors. If we also consider the industrys periodic
attempts to demonize its own customer base (e.g., Home Taping Is Killing Music), it is little surprise that the long-simmering pressure cooker
of consumer resentment would explode once the lid was lifted.
The digitization of music, and musical culture, proved the necessary
catalyst to bring the music industrys tensions with its artists, business
partners, and consumers to a crisis point. By giving artists the tools and
technologies to take charge of their own production, marketing, and
distribution, digitization underscored the disequilibrium of traditional
record contracts and offered what for many is a preferable alternative. Why agree to a 12 percent royalty rate (pre-recoupment, and preshenanigans) when an online self-distribution platform like Tunecore
enables an artist to keep 100 percent of sales revenues for a fixed fee of a
few dollars per track per year? True, a major labelbacked album might
sell more units, but, as the old business adage holds, you cant make up
for negative margins on volume.
Digitization has also challenged traditional music cartels, and the anticompetitive practices they embrace, largely by virtue of its dematerializing effect on recorded music itself. Historically, the cartels were built by
tightly controlling distribution of physical scores and recordings to retail
environments, and by restricting music on the airwaves to clear channels owned by broadcasting conglomerates. Both methods were forms
of manufactured scarcity, inflating the market value of what would
otherwise have been a ubiquitous resource through a constellation of
technological and legal constraints. Digitization largely eliminated these
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technological barriers, by enabling songs to be reproduced and redistributed infinitely at no cost, by providing online retailers with limitless shelf
space, and by enabling webcasters to offer as many different programs
and playlists as there are listeners.
These changes provided greater leverage both to innovative businesses and to consumers. For instance, independent musicians and record
labels no longer had to pay a premium to share shelf space or air time
with the majors; most digital retailers and subscription providers now
boast libraries of 1520 million songs, as does Clear Channels custom
webcasting product, iHeartRadio (though many of the companys terrestrial broadcasting stations still offer playlists of 100 or fewer songs).
Nor are consumers nearly as beholden to the dictates of the marketplace;
if commercial music products and services dont offer appealing features
at reasonable prices, they will seek out their music through other means,
such as P2P.
Not only have these newfound freedoms highlighted by contrast how
unfair the twentieth-century music business was, they have allowed artists, music businesses, and consumers a measure of independence from
the major labels, publishers, retailers, and broadcasters. This independence in turn has allowed a greater degree of criticism without fear of
reprisal. In the meantime, the burgeoning blogosphere and other outlets
of social media have amplified the conversation, bringing once arcane
legal and economic arguments into the public realm. Whereas the industry once operated behind a veil of chic professionalism, today its inner
workings are subject to the judgments and voluble opinions of millions
of armchair business analysts and cultural commentators. Even this book,
which once would have been written in a solitary vacuum and read by a
select group of academic researchers, has been pre-published freely online and already read by thousands of people, many of them presumably
from outside of the academy and music industry. With this greater degree
of overall scrutiny has come a broader acknowledgment of the industrys
faults, its errors, and its foibles; even if the industry transformed itself
today into a global charity focused on curing AIDS and ending poverty,
it seems likely that its uncharitable past would continue to haunt it.
Battling Customers: A Recipe for Badwill

Unfortunately, the music industry did not view digitization as a sign that
its historically anticompetitive business practices needed revamping, or
that its bully image required rehabilitation. Instead, the major labels and
125
their allies tacked in the opposite direction. With the physical mechanism of cartelization quickly evaporating, the industry redoubled its
focus on its legal mechanismnamely, copyright. Now, instead of erecting toll booths outside of retailers and broadcasters, and excluding or
overcharging potential competitors seeking admission, the major labels
and publishers wielded the threat of crippling and sustained litigation to
prevent upstarts and innovators from gaining market share and industry
influence. The strategy appears to have worked, at least to a degree;
as an unidentified industry insider recently told Rutgers law professor
Michael Carrier, from 2000 to 2010, even to this day, there really hasnt
been new innovation in digital music other than iTunes.28
With the renewed focus on copyright as the saving grace of the legacy
music cartels came an amplification in the rhetoric and propaganda surrounding unlicensed uses of music online. Innovative sites and services
were branded as rogues, and their millions of users classified as pirates. These changes were neither coincidental nor reflexive, but rather
the result of what the IFPI called an intense global information campaign [beginning] in 2003, with the aim of explaining the illegality of unauthorised online music distribution. By the recording industrys own
account, the campaigns had an immediate and decisive impact in raising
public awareness on the issue internationally.29 Available data appear
to bear this out; a search of international news sources on the research
archive Westlaw shows the use of the term illegal downloading escalating from 80 stories in 2002 to 315 in 2003; similarly, uses of the term
music piracy grew from 363 to 908 during the same year (fig. 9). Yet
despite these apparent successes, the campaigns also brought some negative consequences, namely a groundswell of badwill (the opposite of
goodwill, in business jargon) among the industrys consumer base. While
such consequences may have been unintended, or even underevaluated
by the industry, they were hardly unforeseen; as an article in Businessweek
warned in January 2003, at the outset of the campaign, Branding too
many customers [as] criminals could incur the wrath of the larger music
community.30
Vitriolic and effective though it may have been, the piracy rhetoric
was only half of the industrys awareness effort. As the IFPI described
it, the campaign was coupled with the launch of extensively publicised lawsuits against major copyright offenders in the US, which were
conceived of not as a means to recoup lost revenues or even to punish
wrongdoers, but rather as a crucial public deterrent against copyright
infringement. In other words, these major copyright offenders, who
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Figure 9. News incidence of terms promoted by IFPI campaigns, 19992011.
by the IFPIs own definition were those who had shared hundreds of
song files via P2P, were targeted for litigation primarily as a media stunt.
Again, by the IFPIs own accounts, the policy was immediately effective; according to its tally, awareness of the illegality of unauthorised
file-swapping in the US rose from 37% before the lawsuits to 64% in
December 2003.31
Like those of the awareness campaign, the litigation initiatives measurable short-term successes were easily matched by long-term strategic
failures. If calling its own customers criminals had spurred some negative
backlash, suing them by the thousands, after explicitly pledging not to do
so,32 officially put the music industry at war with the population at large.
And like some actual military interventions, this quickly became a classic
quagmire; even as the evident costs to goodwill mounted, the industry
remained far too invested to cease operations and withdraw. The initiative began with a splash, with 261 lawsuits filed against alleged P2P users
in September 2003 and the promise that thousands more suits would
follow if need be.33 The RIAA lived up to its word; five years later, the
major labels had sued over 35,000 Americans.34
The badwill associated with the RIAA lawsuits wasnt simply a matter
of freeloaders grousing at the consequences of their own wrongdoing.
127
An unprecedented wave of mass litigation by an industry against its own

customers was a pretty ugly story to begin with. Forcing these tens of
thousands of defendants to settle for thousands of dollars apiece or face
mounting legal costs and the threat of millions of dollars in damages was
worse; it was widely (and accurately, in my opinion) perceived as bullying. Failing to compensate musicians for the revenues collected from
these suits35 cemented this perception, and undermined the labels claims
that they were motivated primarily by the desire to support their artists. But the greatest blow to the recording industrys reputation was
in its seemingly callous disregard for the lives of its defendants, many
of whom were either so clearly innocent, or so severely challenged by
circumstance, as to warrant leniencya consideration they received belatedly, or not at all.
Several publications have examined these cases in far greater detail36
than I can here, so I will simply mention a few notable examples. One
of the initial 261 major offenders to be sued was Brianna LaHara, a
twelve-year-old honors student living in a New York City housing project. Despite her parents financial straits, and the fact that her mother had
actually paid $29.99 to use the KaZaA P2P service, the RIAA demanded
(and received, in less than a day) a $2,000 settlement and a public apology.37 In addition to targeting minors, the industry has also sued the
elderly, and even the deceased. In 2005, the RIAA sued an eighty-threeyear-old, technologically illiterate woman named Gertrude Walton for
allegedly sharing over 700 songs via P2Pa week after it had received a
copy of her death certificate from her daughter in response to a warning letter.38 This case was wisely dropped once the press caught wind
of it. Similarly, after a P2P defendant named Larry Scantlebury died in
the midst of litigation, the RIAA requested that the case be stayed for
sixty days to allow the family additional time to grieve, then resumed
the suit by deposing his children.39 The RIAA has also sued apparently
innocent people without even alerting them to the situation. When the
Rockmart Journal, a local paper in Georgia, called nearby resident James
Walls to ask for comment on his being named as a defendant, he seemed
taken by surprise. I dont understand this, he reportedly responded.
How can they sue us when we dont even have a computer?40
College students are a natural target for the RIAA, but sometimes its
choice of students and methods of addressing them have seemed almost
calculated to produce badwill. In November 2002, as the war on terror
was gearing up in Afghanistan and elsewhere, the organization goaded
the US Naval Academy into raiding one hundred of its own midship128
CHAPTER 6
men, confiscating their computers in the middle of class and threatening

to court martial those found guilty of infringing copyright.41 In 2006,
an MIT student named Cassi Hunt, who had been sued for file sharing,
called the RIAAs settlement negotiation hotline and tried to explain
that she couldnt afford either a sustained legal defense or the $3,750
settlement theyd requested. As she reported in an article in campus
paper The Tech, the negotiator told her that the RIAA has been known
to suggest that students drop out of college or go to community college
in order to be able to afford settlements. Hunts analysis of the situation aptly summarized the message communicated by the litigation campaign: The Recording Industry of America would rather see Americas
youth deprived of higher education, forever marring their ability to contribute personally and financially to societyincluding the artsso that
they may crucify us as examples to our peers. To say nothing of wrecking
our lives in the process.42
Finally, the RIAA has on several occasions targeted severely ill or disabled people for litigation. According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF; a nonprofit group that advocates for civil liberties in cyberspace), one defendant, a fully disabled widow and veteran, was sued
for downloading five hundred songs she already had copies of on CD.
In her case, P2P was used purely for accessibility; she wanted to listen
to her music collection in the room where she spent most of her time.
The RIAA offered a $2,000 settlement, on the condition that she share a
wealth of private information regarding her disability and her finances.43
In 2007, the labels sued John Paladuk, a former railroad worker who
had recently suffered a stroke that paralyzed the left side of his body,
and whose sole source of income was his disability check. The alleged
infringements had taken place in Michigan, and Mr. Paladuk had lived
in Florida at the time they took place.44 After nearly two months of litigation (and negative coverage in publications including BoingBoing, the
Consumerist, and the New York Times), the RIAA agreed to dismiss the
case, leaving each party to bear his its/his own fees and costs. In another case, the recording industry aggressively pursued Rae J. Schwartz,
a Queens, New York, mother suffering from multiple sclerosis, who
could only travel aboard a motorized scooter and who maintained that
she had never downloaded anything illegally. Her lawyer requested that
the case be dropped, the plaintiffs declined, and the suit went forward,
with the court assigning a legal guardian to stand for Ms. Schwartz. After
more than two years of harrowing and expensive litigation, the parties
settled out of court for undisclosed terms.45
129
Its perfectly reasonable to assume that the cases Ive outlined above
are the exceptions rather than the rule; most P2P defendants arent quite
so unfortunate, and its possible that the majority of them are, in fact,
liable (although Ray Beckerman, a defense attorney who knows more
about these suits than anyone else outside of the RIAA, holds otherwise).46 Yet, from the standpoint of goodwill and public relations, these
questions are irrelevant. The recording industry inaugurated this policy
as part of a public awareness campaign, and by the end of its five-year
run,47 the public was painfully aware that the industry seemed hell-bent
on protecting its assets at any cost. In the words of a 2009 article in the
Minnesota Journal of Law, Science & Technology, the industrys strategy to
counter digital music piracy has embittered or calloused a substantial
portion of the public. In particular, the lawsuit component of the industrys approach, besides being ineffective, has proven highly repugnant.48
Toward the end, even some record industry executives and organizations publicly acknowledged that the strategy had backfired. For instance, EMI threatened to leave the IFPI over the bad public image resulting from the suits,49 and Jennifer Pariser, an attorney for Sony Music,
admitted under oath that the lawsuits represented a money pit for the
labels.50 Yet when RIAA president Cary Shermanthe definitive industry spokesmanwas interviewed by Declan McCullagh of CNET News,
he showed neither remorse nor trepidation about the litigation tactics
or their ruinous effects on defendants. In response to the question Do
you view your lawsuits, even ones where you sued a 12-year-old girl or
a Boston grandmother, as a success overall and do you think the process
is working?, Sherman responded, Yes. Were feeling pretty good.51
Insult to Injury: Further Piracy Crusade Debacles

In addition to the significant badwill engendered by the music industrys
past business practices and its recent litigious fervor, the piracy crusade
has been repeatedly marked by public relations debacles that have presented the industry as duplicitous, corrupt, and/or clueless. Ultimately,
it is irrelevant whether these characterizations, like the lawsuits, reflect
the industrys typical conduct or demeanor; the important thing is that
the labels reputations have been further tarnished.
An early example of this propensity for bad PR took place in 1997,
when the industry was just ramping up its efforts to combat MP3-hosting
websites. The RIAA identified ParSoft Interactive, a game design company from Plano, Texas, as one such online infringer. Instead of calling
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the company and asking it to stop, RIAA lawyers stormed in like the
Men in Black, the Parsoft business manager told a reporter soon afterward. They threw down a huge swatch of legal papers and said, Youre
running an illegal site. . . . It was a week of hell and $10,000 down the
toilet. After ParSoft was forced to retain both an attorney and a public
relations firm to defend the suit and the companys reputation, it turned
out that the files hadnt been posted by anyone at the company, but
rather by an employee of their Internet service provider.52
While the Parsoft incident can be written off as a regrettable but somewhat humorous case of mistaken identity, other anti-piracy fiascos have
not been quite so benign. For instance, as early as 2002, the RIAA and
its frequent partner in the piracy crusade, the MPAA,53 successfully convinced Congress to introduce a bill that would have indemnified both
groups against all state and federal laws in their attempts to stop a publicly accessible peer-to-peer file-trading networkessentially granting
them carte blanche to hack into and destroy any private or commercial
computer suspected of hosting unlicensed content. Given the obvious
risks of false accusations and the lack of legal checks and balances, there
was little doubt among its critics that such a law would have led to significant, unrecoverable damages sustained by innocent parties. Moreover,
there was legitimate concern (considering the industries histories) that
such power could have been used as an effective tool for anticompetitive
tactics. Consequently, the Berkeley law professor Mark Lemley characterized the bill as a nightmare,54 Will Rodger of the CCIA55 referred to
it as vigilante justice for the 21st century,56 and the tech policy analyst
Hal Plotkin, writing on the San Francisco Chronicle website, called it an
incredibly vivid example of how easily government officials can unintentionally screw up the economy.57
Unsurprisingly, given the backlash it generated, this particular bill died
in subcommittee. But that didnt stop the music industry from experimenting with computer hacking as a piracy deterrent. On Halloween
2005, a blogger and tech researcher named Mark Russinovich posted
a lengthy analysis58 of a new security risk he had discovered: copyprotection technology installed on a CD manufactured by Sony BMG
had, without his knowledge or consent, installed a rootkit on his computer. In Russinovichs words, rootkits are cloaking technologies that
hide files, Registry keys, and other system objects from diagnostic and
security software, and they are usually employed by malware attempting to keep their implementation hidden. In other words, even without Congressional carte blanche (or suspicion of infringement, for that
131
matter), Sony BMG had gone ahead with its hacking plan. In the weeks
that followed, it turned out that tens, if not hundreds, of millions of discs
contained the software, which not only opened a back door in users
computers, exposing them to malicious hackers, but also slowed down
and in many cases crashed their computers. Some consumer electronics,
such as car stereos, were also affected (in fact, my own Sony car stereo
became unusable after I tried to play a Sony Music CD in it). After a
tsunami of negative publicity, several class action lawsuits,59 and several
investigations by state and federal regulators, the CDs were recalled,
and Sony BMG published uninstallers for the softwarewhich, sadly,
presented new security threats when used.60
After this colossal debacle, one would think the major labels would
take greater care to ensure their customers privacy and security. Yet
security problems related to the piracy crusade have continued to crop
upfor example, in 2009 it was discovered that BayTSP, which policed
online copyright infringement on behalf of the RIAA and MPAA, was
storing all of the data about the identities of suspected infringers in an
unsecured Internet database, permitting it to be searched via Google and
allowing anyone with hackerish leanings ample opportunity to create
all kinds of mischief.61
Finally, there have been several instances of apparent piracy and
corruption by the piracy crusaders themselves. Some of this is predictable, garden-variety hypocrisy, as when sixty television shows (worth $9
million in damages, according to statutory rates) downloaded illegally
via BitTorrent were tracked to the RIAAs headquarters,62 or when executives at nearly every major entertainment industry company in the
US were caught downloading both music and movies via P2P.63 But
sometimes the stories have taken a darker turn. For example, there is
the case of Melchior Rietveldt, a freelance music producer who was
commissioned to compose a soundtrack for an anti-piracy video released
by BREIN (the Dutch entertainment industry trade association) in 2006.
The following year, Rietveldt bought a DVD of a Harry Potter movie and
was shocked to find that the video had been included on the disc, in direct
violation of his contract with BREIN, which limited its use to a local film
festival. After doing some research, the composer discovered that the
video had been included on tens of millions of Dutch DVDs without his
knowledge, consent, or remuneration. In other words, his anti-piracy
song had been pirated by the piracy crusaders.
Rietveldt soon contacted the music rights organization Buma/Stemra
in search of what he estimated were about a million euros in unpaid
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royalties. The organization, which according to its website64 represents

the interests of music authors and help[s] enforce copyright, was not
immediately forthcoming with either royalties or advice. After years of
effort, Rietveldt finally heard back from a Buma/Stemra board member
named Jochem Gerrits, who offered to help him recover the unpaid royalties. But the offer came at a steep price: Gerrits demanded that he personally be paid 33 percent of whatever money was recouped. Fortunately,
the Dutch television show PowNews recorded Gerritss extortion request
in a phone conversation with Rietveldts financial adviser, and Gerrits
was exposed and forced to temporarily resign. Whether Rietveldt ultimately prevails in his lawsuits against BREIN and Gerrits, the damage
to the industrys goodwill has been done. The scandal has been called
corrupt, a money grab, and mafia-like by prominent politicians and
musicians,65 and has been covered by media outlets around the globe.
THAT THE music industrys reputation, both among consumers
and within the business community, has taken a beating in recent years is
clear. And though digital technologies such as P2P have certainly played
a role, the developers or users of these technologies are not necessarily
to blame. To the contrary, it is the piracy crusaders themselvesprimarily, the major labelswho have ruined whatever goodwill the industry
once enjoyed.
In part this results from the public airing of years of dirty laundry
poor labor relations and questionable business practicesin the wake of
digitization, which has both shifted the industrys balance of power and
provided an outlet for the industrys critics to collect and share information. But, ironically, the bulk of the badwill can almost certainly be attributed to the recording industrys efforts to curb what it calls digital
music piracy. By insulting and litigating against its own consumers, and
pursuing several highly publicized suits against seemingly innocent, unfortunate, or otherwise sympathetic defendants, the RIAA and its constituent labels have come to be seen as intransigent bullies, big businesses
willing to pick on the little guy66 in order to enforce obedience through
fear. And by tolerating P2P usage and worse hypocrisies within its own
ranks, the industry has further eroded any moral high ground it might
have sought in the arena of public opinion.
Whats more, these highly publicized lapses amount to far more than
a mere embarrassment or black mark on the industrys reputation. Because goodwill is so central to the music economy, the greatest damage
can be measured in the industrys bottom line. Although it is impossible
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to quantify precisely, there can be little doubt that the impairment of

goodwill is a primary factor in defections among artists, mistrust among
potential partners and business clientele, and indifference or hostility
within the customer base.67 According to a recent survey in Britain,
nearly half of all music fans now believe its acceptable to download
music free of charge.68 The recording industry would probably interpret
this fact as a sign that its awareness campaigns and antipiracy efforts need
to be improved upon and amplified. As I have argued in this chapter, the
opposite conclusion is far more reasonablethe music economy has suffered because of, not despite, the piracy crusade.
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The Piracy Crusade!
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PA R T I I I
Collateral Damage:
The Hidden Costs of
the Piracy Crusade
IN THIS FINAL section, I address the social and economic costs of the industrys piracy crusade and consider
some of the longer-term dangers we face if the crusade is
allowed to continue.
Given the pro-business veneer of the music industrys
rhetoric, its ironic that one of the principal victims of
the piracy crusade is the music business itself. The major
labels unwillingness to license their music to innovators
on viable terms, combined with their inability to innovate
on their own, paralyzed the industry at exactly the moment when new technologies offered the greatest amount
of promise and when consumers expressed the greatest
enthusiasm for new products and services. Similarly, the
anti-piracy laws and policies promoted by the industry
seem tailored to keep established oligopolists firmly in
place, while eliminating the market conditions that allowed upstarts (and the major labels and broadcasters
themselves) to reinvent the music industry in the past.
Far more troubling than the piracy crusades commercial effects, however, are its social effects. An underlying
political agenda that privileges the short-term interests of
135
media cartels over the long-term health and viability of our

democratic institutions has prompted the music industry
and its allies to promote an increasingly draconian set
of laws and policies in the United States and around the
world. Collectively, these laws and policies threaten to
stifle free speech and the open public sphere, and provide
ample opportunity for exploitation by anti-competitive
business interests, repressive political regimes, and organized criminals alike. These threats will only grow as networked communications become ever more pervasive and
as the piracy crusade successfully promotes ever stricter
laws governing the flow of information via these networks.
Ultimately, neither musical culture and industry nor democratic society can thrive until the crusade is ended and its
policies are dismantled.
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COLLATERAL DAMAGE
CHAPTER 7
This Sounds Way Too Good

No Good Idea Goes Unpunished
IN MOMENTS of quiet reverie, I often return to a favorite fantasy of
mineone most likely shared by many media and technology enthusiasts of a certain age. I have been transported back in time to visit my teenage self, equipped with the latest twenty-first-century gadgetry. I watch
as fifteen-year-old me familiarizes himself with the smooth contours and
intuitive interface of my MacBook, tests his mettle in the multiplayer
mode of the latest Halo installment on a sixty-inch HDTV, and reminisce
with him about our childhood as we retrace the geography of our shared
past via Google Earth. All of this, naturally, blows his little analog mind.
But the thing that gets his heartand mineracing the fastest is the
music technology.
I amaze my younger self with Shazams ability to identify any song
just by listening to it for a few seconds. Together, we search for rare
Bob Dylan concert videos on YouTube. I set up GarageBand on an iPad
and help him cut a demo of his latest peace-punk anthem. But I save
the crowning achievement of my era for last. Holding up a sleek little
box about the size of a half deck of cards, I tell him this device holds
up to forty thousand songs! His interest seems piqued, but the ecstatic
response I expected fails to materialize. I watch him do some mental
calculations, and then he frowns. I dont get it, he tells me. How can
anyone afford to fill one of those things?
Unfortunately, I have no legal answer to this question. Nor does the
music industry. Over the past two decades, thanks to Moores law, massive capital investment, and the loving labor of thousands of independent developers, innovations in hardware, software, interface design,
and communication networks have profoundly altered musical culture
and practice. Today, there is little we can imagine doing with music that
137
cant be realized through some kind of digital interventionand our

imaginations are growing more adventurous with every passing year.
Yet, despite (or because of) this rapid change, the music industry seems
unwilling or unable to match its pace by developing new business models that take advantage of these innovative technologies and emerging
cultural behaviors.
Now, wait a minute, you may be thinking. Every day, I read about
some hot new digital music startup. And I get all the music I could ask
for, legally, from services that didnt even exist a decade ago. What more
could I want? This is a perfectly reasonable objection. Yet if we look at
the digital music companies that dominate todays industry, they are
precisely those that offer the least innovation, and are therefore the most
viable partners for an inflexible recording sector. As I discussed in chapter 3, part of the reason iTunes was able to dominate the music market
for much of the past decade is that it replicated the traditional wholesale/retail relationship with the labels, requiring very little adaptation
on their end. The price, as I discussed in chapter 5, was the unbundling
of the album, which has simultaneously depressed music sales revenues
and limited consumers ability to fill their own iPods with legally obtained music (as my younger self noted, it would cost $40,000 at a dollar
a song). Pandora, the reigning titan of the webcasting sector, innovated
as much as it could without crossing the line into interactive webcasting as defined by copyright law. This way, the company could go about
its business using statutory licenses and without ever having to negotiate with the labels or publishers.1 The result isnt quite traditional radio,
but its certainly not the most functional or adventurous service that the
companys music genome technology (now more than a decade old)
could supportnor is it yet profitable.2 By the same token, Spotify, the
newest darling of the digital music business, is essentially relying on a
business model first proposed at the dawn of the digital music era3yet
it took the company five years from its founding and three years from its
European launch to become available commercially in the United States,
largely because of licensing difficulties. Moreover, the companys CEO
acknowledged at the end of 2012 that, although recording artists have
complained loudly about getting short-changed by the company, it has
yet to become profitable4at least in part because its licenses with the
labels still treat each song streamed by the service as a unique financial
transaction, rather than settling for a fixed percentage of revenue.
Thus, while digital technology has certainly played a transformative
role in the music industry, this transformation has been hindered to a
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considerable degree by the difficulties faced by innovators in their dealings with the legacy cartels. Unlike iTunes and Pandora, most new digital music services must face a choice between entering into extended,
and likely fruitless, negotiations with the major labels before launching,
or being branded as piracy enablers and litigated out of existence. Either way, only a small fraction of the good ideas ever make it to market,
and only a handful of those become stable, revenue-generating (let alone
profitable) businesses. This isnt simply an annoyance to those of us
hoping to impress our inner adolescents with the wonders of the digital
futureits a significant hindrance to the development of the industry,
and a serious drain on economic growth. As the business professors Jeff
Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton M. Christensen write in the introduction to their book The Innovators DNA, innovation is the lifeblood of our
global economy and a strategic priority for virtually every CEO around
the world.5 In other words, an industry incapable of adapting toand
capitalizing ontechnological change is doomed to obsolescence.
Unfortunately, innovation has never been one of the music industrys
strong points; even in the pre-digital era, the labels attitude toward new
technology always mixed optimism and distrust in equal measure. In a
blog post, Steve Blank, a tech entrepreneur and the author of the Silicon
Valley bible The Four Steps to the Epiphany,6 explained how the music
business has often innovated in spite of itself: The music and movie
business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms
and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new
technology produced a new market far larger than the [negative] impact
it had on the existing market.7
This resistance to new ideas has only increased in the digital age, as
the gap between the innovators and the industry has widened. The resulting stalemate has essentially ground the wheels of progress to a halt,
hurting businesses old and new, as well as consumers and musicians. The
Rutgers law professor Michael Carrier, who published an extensive study
on this subject, argues that the music industry is largely to blame for its
own economic collapse because of its single-minded focus on preserving
an existing business model and ignoring or quashing disruptive threats
to the model and its consequent reliance on overaggressive copyright
law and enforcement, [which] has substantially and adversely affected
innovation.8
In the remainder of this chapter, I tell the stories of five promising digital music businesses that suffered as a result of such policies.9 Although
these are only a handful among hundreds if not thousands, each is in its
THIS SOUNDS WAY TOO GOOD
139
own way emblematic of the dysfunction at the heart of the music industry in the digital age. Through their stories, I hope to provide a glimpse
of whats been lost and what the costs have been to both musical industry
and culture, as well as a sense of the human toll, measured in terms of
wasted hours and diminished dreams.
Putting the Play in Playlist: Uplister

In 1999, few record label executives were more in touch with the brewing digital music revolution than Jeremy Silver. As vice president of new
media at EMI, Silver was charged with granting licenses to deserving
innovators. In his words, I had every single music Internet company
that had a new business model for music coming in to see me and putting their business plan across my desk.10 From his office on the ninth
floor of Los Angeles iconic Capitol Tower, he could see Hollywood
spread out beneath him, and he was excited when he thought about the
changes that would soon transform its business landscape.
The problem was, not everyone in the business, or even within his
own company, was as excited as Silver was. As he told me, hed been
experiencing a degree of frustration with EMI at that point, because
even though hed been busy granting licenses, often in exchange for big
cash advances or equity stakes in the companies themselves, we werent
actually developing our side of the deal to be able to really play ball.
Silver might be granting innovators permission to use their content, but
the label was dragging its heels when it came to providing these companies with access to the content itself. There was no in-house infrastructure
to digitize and distribute songs, nor were any of the associated assets,
such as videos and metadata, readily available to licensees, and there
was no effort to bring the bands themselves to the table to help augment
and promote the services. It was as though the company were partially
paralyzed, with Silvers department intent on moving forward and the
rest of the organization refusing to budge.
One day, a group of engineers came to his office, and though they
didnt have much of a business plan, their technology piqued his interest.
He decided that even if the music industry was visibly missing the boat,
it didnt mean that he had to be left on the shore. In May 2000, Silver
tendered his resignation at EMI, and signed on as the executive vice president for the engineers digital music startup, which was called Uplister.
Uplisters basic premise was simple: if digitization was going to unbundle the traditional album (a fact that was already evident to many in
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the industry), music could be re-bundled by the listeners in the form of

playlists, which could then be searched and shared among the services
user base. Music itself might become ubiquitous and commoditized, but
the service of providing access to songs, combined with a social platform
catalyzing musical community through the act of sharing, would still be
a valuableand potentially profitableenterprise.
When Uplister launched in September 2000, it had almost every
piece in place: powerful and intuitive software for creating, sharing, and
searching playlists, an enthusiastic early adopter community ready and
willing to pay for the ability to use the service, and enough venture
capital to last a year without revenues or additional cash infusions. The
only things missing were licenses from the major labels. Without them,
the service could legally provide only thirty-second clips of each song11
a good proof-of-concept, but hardly a compelling proposition for music
fans.
Silver knew the licenses would be a make-or-break for his company.
Without them, he acknowledged, the service would be hugely inferior.
It was much more exciting once you were able to turn all the music on.
Yet, he wasnt terribly concerned; as a recent EMI executive, Silver had
little doubt that he would be greeted with open arms. After all, these
executives were his friends and former colleagues. And besides, who
knew better how to approach negotiations than someone who within
recent memory had sat on both sides of the table?
Silver now realizes that this expectation was evidence of his incredible naivet. True to the old saying, he found that he couldnt go home
again. As soon as Id crossed that bridge and became someone in a technology company, he remembers, everything that we did was viewed
with suspicion. Not only did the labels have fundamental business concerns regarding Uplisters ability to distribute music profitably based on
an untested model, Silver also believes that personal feelings got in the
way. In his words:
There was this idea that these guys might go out and make a load of
money that were not making. And they might make a load of money
on the back of our content. And he might make a load of money that
he wasnt making with us. . . . And I knew that because Id sat there
in plenty of meetings from the other side of the table, feeling exactly
like that about all these guys coming in. Thinking, Well, hang on, this
sounds way too good. Which is why I started wanting to become
part of it.
141
In the end, the major labels never quite said no to Uplister. They simply never got around to saying yes, demanding millions of dollars apiece
in advances, and refusing to negotiate for a lower fee, even though the
sums they asked would bankrupt the fledgling enterprise. Nor did they
respond to Silvers appeals with any kind of enthusiasm or alacrity. As he
described it, the major labels attitude . . . when there was a problem was
this is too difficult, well go really slowly. And for a venture-funded
startup with a high burn rate in a rapidly evolving business and technological environment, this amounted to the kiss of death. Things were a
bit better with the indie labels, who were much more interested, much
more engaged, much more willing to experiment, and thus granted
licenses to Uplister only a year or so after the company launched.
Unfortunately, this proved too little, too late. By September 2001,
Uplister had about 750,000 users, six weeks of cash left in the bank,
and zero major label music on its site. As Silver recalls, It was like we
were in this race car, although someone had disabled the brakes, and
we were headed for a wall. It was horrible. The dot-com bust earlier
that year had made investors far more cautious, and venture capitalists
(VCs) were unwilling to pour more money into the company if it didnt
have a fully functional service. Then came the attacks of September 11,
which froze investment entirely. Silver was forced to lay off his thirtyfive employees, his wife and young children returned to their native
England, and Uplister shut its doors permanently. Although Silver soon
moved on to become the CEO of the music composition software company Sibelius, his experience at Uplister had left him with a lingering
sense of personal regret that starkly contrasts with his earlier optimism
and enthusiasm. Actually, its quite painful thinking about it, he told
me. It wasnt fun.
Putting the Play in Playlist: Muxtape

Nearly seven years after Uplister closed its doors, a twenty-four-yearold designer and DJ named Justin Ouellette, who had never heard of
the company, came up with a similar idea. For years, he had been using
the Internet to keep track of his college radio playlists, both as a public
service and as a personal diary of sorts. Having been an avid Napster
user in high school, Ouellette knew that the Internet was a powerful
medium for music distribution, and to him it seemed like an incredibly
tragic disconnect12 that there was no simple way to turn his curated list
of songs into an active, on-demand digital playlist. So he set out to rem142
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edy the problem. I just became sort of obsessed with why that couldnt
happen, he told me. Why cant I just click on these songs, and hear
them right now?
Because Ouellettes primary expertise was in design and his computer
programming skills were only at the hobbyist level, and because he had
a full-time job at the video sharing site Vimeo, he initially viewed his pet
project strictly as a user interface experiment. After working nights
tinkering on his playlist software for some time, he suddenly realized that
it was two or three weeks away from being releasable. He quit his day
job and buckled down, spending most of March 2008 in full-time development. Even at this point, however, he didnt view it necessarily as a
career move. It was more of a creative challenge, a test of his minimalist
design principles. I want the whole site to be music, he told himself.
Literally, the surface area of the site should [have] very few areas you
click on without hearing something.
After three weeks of intense work on the project, which he dubbed
Muxtape (a portmanteau of MUX, an electronic device that manages
the flow of audio or video signals, and mixtape), Ouellette was ready to
share his creation with the world. Because it wasnt initially intended as a
commercial project, there was no marketing or promotion involved with
its launch, though he was certainly optimistic about its social impact. He
posted a screenshot of the Muxtape logo to his Tumblr blog, and told his
readers, Im proud to introduce Muxtape, a new way to share, discover,
and listen to hand-picked music online. . . . My goal is nothing short of
changing the way we consume, distribute, and discover music.13
The response was sudden and overwhelming, in part because some
of Justins Tumblr readers were themselves influential bloggers. Within
four and a half hours, a thousand people had signed up for the service.
Within twenty-four hours, thirty-five thousand people had visited the
site, and about a quarter of them had signed up to use it, posting nearly
twenty thousand songs. His post was the most reblogged item on
Tumblr, and his site melted under the heavy strain of its exponential
growth.
Music fans werent the only ones who responded quickly to Muxtapes
release. The day after he launched the site, Ouellette started hearing
from record labels. Universal Music Group was the first to contact him.
The labels general counsel called Ouellette directly (how they got my
contact information is still a mystery), and asked where he should send
the summons. Independent labels also e-mailed him, but unlike the majors, they were mostly inquisitive, not hostile or anything.
143
Wow, Im really onto something, Ouellette thought to himself.

I should get a lawyer immediately. So he found a prominent music
attorney willing to take him on a deferred-compensation basis, and immediately entered into negotiations with labels big and small. He spent
the entire summer in negotiations, all the while tending to his rapidly
growing site. He found the process simultaneously fascinating, frustrating, and absurd. It was real Jekyll and Hyde, he told me:
It was weird, because Id have the business development people on
one side of the table. And then on the other side of the table is the
legal side. And the meeting would start, and the business side would
say, Justin, thanks for coming in. We love Muxtape. We use it in
the office, its so cool. Lets talk about some possibilities. And then
Id turn my head to the right, and the lawyers would be like, We
are going to sue you into the ground. We want the site shut down
by the weekend. This wont stand. Were going to destroy you.
And Im like, You guys gotta talk to each other. Decide whether
you want to quash me or do a deal. But its like literally having two
different meetings at the same table.
Ouellette was savvy enough to understand that this Jekyll and Hyde
routine was essentially the labels version of good cop / bad cop; the
threat of litigation, while real, wasnt immediate. Instead, the labels appeared to be using it as a form of leverage. This wasnt a problem, as far
as he was concerned; once the licensing terms were worked out, and he
paid appropriate retroactive royalties for the sites first months of operation, everybody would get along just fine. His attitude toward the labels
at the time, he told me, was you guys are snakes, but, you know, I can
respect the game.
It was clear to Ouellette that the four majors had conferred about
terms prior to their separate negotiations with Muxtape. They each offered essentially the same deal: the service would have to pay anywhere
from a half cent to two cents each time a song was played on the site, it
would have to share 50 percent of its revenues (Ouellette anticipated selling ads to music-related companies) with the majors, and it would have
to give each major an ownership stake in Muxtape ranging from one to
five percent. Against these terms, the labels collectively required cash
advances amounting to ten or fifteen million dollars. Although he considered them onerous, Ouellette was willing to accept the labels terms,
as long as theyd allow him to go about his business in peace. Im not
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interested in being a millionaire, he told me. What I really wanted was

to build the best music experience.
The problem, from Ouellettes perspective, was that even if he agreed
to the financial terms, he still couldnt build the best music experience
as he envisioned it. Some of the major labels also insisted on having
some say in the project, for instance, demanding that Muxtapes front
page dedicate a certain portion of its space to promoting major label
bands. For an obsessive design geek, this was simply beyond the pale.
I started to get freaked out a little bit, he recalls. What I want for my
money is to be able to develop this product exactly the way I want to and
with total transparency. Im not gonna turn this into a new payola. This
is not going to be a new thing where the record industry gets to fuck it
up just like theyve fucked everything else up.
Meanwhile, Ouellette had another problem on his hands. While he
was theoretically willing to let the labels drink me dry, in terms of
money, potential Muxtape investors were not so sanguine about the
proposed financial terms. As he discovered, theres a lot of music-loving
venture capitalists in New York who just could not stomach the idea of
paying that much money to a bunch of robber barons. Without the
major label licenses, Muxtape would have cost a half million dollars to
become a viable business. With them, he needed to raise thirty times
that amount just to get off the ground. Once Ouellette realized that he
was essentially stuck between the rock of the major labels and the hard
place of the VCs, it started to dawn on him that maybe this isnt going
to work out.
Unfortunately, Ouellette never made it past this point in the negotiations anyway. Out of the blue, he received an e-mail from Amazon Web
Services, which hosted the Muxtape site, saying it was going to shut
down the server in twenty-four hours, pursuant to legal action by the
RIAA. He immediately called Amazon, with whom hed been in acquisition talks, but they claimed to have no influence over their corporate
sibling. He confronted the labels with whom hed been negotiating, and
though none of them would cop to having ordered the closure, none
of them were willing to make the call to the RIAA to stop it, either.
At this point, Muxtape was less than six months old, it had six hundred thousand active and enthusiastic users, it was the darling of the
blogosphere and mainstream media alike, and, as far as Ouellette was
concerned, it was dead in the water. Once the site was taken off-line, it
would lose the momentum it had enjoyed since its debut, and it would
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become toxic for any investor because of the cloudy legal outlook.
And, most important, Ouellette told me, I felt betrayed. I was like, this
is not a negotiation in good faith. The labels had failed to live up to even
his diminished expectations of how the game was played. So he pulled
the plug on negotiations, closed down the site, and replaced it with a
brief note saying that Muxtape will be unavailable for a brief period
while we sort out a problem with the RIAA.
After spending a long weekend feeling sad, Ouellette dedicated a
few months to developing a new version of Muxtape, in which bands
and labels could voluntarily post music as a form of self-promotion; that
way, licenses wouldnt be necessary. After six months, he closed the
doors on that, as well. My heart wasnt in it the same way anymore,
he confessed. It just wasnt as interesting to me as a product. Today,
Ouellette works at Tumblr, the site where the Muxtape story began, and
says he love[s] working there. . . . If theres anywhere that the spirit of
Muxtape is alive, its in Tumblr.14 Despite his own ventures disappointing outcome, he acknowledges that thatll probably go down as the best
year of my life. . . . I dont have any real regrets. Nonetheless, he told
me, there is one thing that continues to bother him: I still wish the state
of music on the Internet was better.
Music in the Cloud: MyPlay

In early 1999, while Jeremy Silver was still sitting at his desk in the Capitol Tower and Napster was just a germ of an idea in Shawn Fannings
mind, David Pakman was already fed up with the state of digital music.
As vice president of business and product development at the online
music retailer N2K (which had recently merged with its competitor
CDnow), he realized that the newly popular MP3 format represented
the future of his business and the writing on the wall for the CD format.
Yet, as it stood in those days, the digital music experience was hugely
frustrating.15 There were only a few, low-capacity portable MP3 players available on the market (the iPod was still almost three years away),
and the process of ripping CDs and transferring songs to such a device
was very cumbersome, it wasnt very elegant. A layperson couldnt
really do it.
Pakman and his former Apple colleague Doug Camplejohn decided
that there was good money to be made in streamlining the process, using
the Internets growing speed, capacity, and ubiquity as the foundation
for peoples personal digital music libraries. The basic value proposition
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was simple. In Pakmans words, if youre going to be ripping CDs, you

should store your music in the sky16 so you can get to it from any device.
So they created a prototype, which they called a digital storage locker,
and cofounded a new company around the concept, which they named
MyPlay.
Although the service represented a significant step forward for digital music users, it wasnt quite as powerful as Pakman and Camplejohn
wanted. The problem was getting all of the ripped digital music into the
locker in the first place. At dial-up broadband speeds (typically 28.8 or
56.6 kilobits per second), which were standard at the time, a single song
could easily take fifteen minutes, and a library of a hundred CDs could
take over two weeks (assuming constant transfer, which would mean
no outages and no telephone usage on the dial-up line). In other words,
there was virtually no way that MyPlay users could store their entire
music libraries on the service.
There was a simple engineering solution. MyPlay could create its own
library of music, allowing its users to stream the songs that corresponded
to their CD collections without having to rip them and then transfer the
files themselves to their lockers. But this solution entailed some problems
of its own. Although there was a strong argument that fair use provisions17 of copyright law covered self-transfer of files, Pakman believed
that the automatic streaming solution was not something we could employ without licenses. And so we didnt go that route, although its more
elegant. This was a considerable compromise; as former Apple product
developers, elegance was almost a religion for MyPlays founders. Yet,
as experienced music industry executives, they also knew it was a litigious and dangerous place to play, and so [they] carefully designed a
solution that was not copyright-infringing.
Thus, when MyPlay launched in October 1999, it was legal, but inelegant. Pakman and Camplejohn immediately set out to rectify this
situation, reaching out to copyright owners in order to build a more
streamlined, licensed version. Yet despite constant conversation with
the record labels, they were not successful in achieving an accord. As
Pakman recalls:
They required huge advances. They wanted all sorts of changes in
the product to conform to whatever their views were about how
the product should behave, which was a problem for a bunch of
Silicon Valley guys, who frankly knew a lot more about how to
design products than record company execs. They wanted all sorts
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of promotional guarantees (youre gonna use your inventory to promote our stuff, this often and this much space). They wanted equity
in the company, they wanted the advances, and obviously a piece of
revenue as we built the service up. . . . [I]t was just all not practical.
In other words, the major labels made the same set of crippling demands on MyPlay that they would make on Muxtape a decade later.
And, like Ouellette, Pakman found the pill too bitter to swallow. In his
words, we never signed any deals because the terms were so onerous.
By the spring of 2001, the company had managed, despite spending a
year and a half in fruitless negotiations, to attract eight million users. But
the service was still inelegant (especially in comparison to the booming
unlicensed P2P services), and revenues were paltry. Then, soon after a
proposed $200 million acquisition by Yahoo imploded because of disagreements over a preexisting partnership with its rival AOL, the tech
bubble burst, and MyPlays horizons narrowed. Without major label licenses, there was little chance that newly cautious investors would continue to support MyPlays business.
So Pakman and Camplejohn sold the company (for considerably less
than $200 million) to the only buyer still on the marketBertelsmann
eCommerce Group, the sister company to major label BMG.18 Presumably, the company would now have an easier time obtaining licenses,
and the plan was to integrate its locker service with the soon-to-beobsolete CD subscription service BMG Music Club. Although Pakman
was disappointed about the earlier setbacks, he was still optimistic about
MyPlays future at Bertelsmann. He was excited to work for his new
boss, Andreas Schmidt, and thought he was going to do great things.
Unfortunately, Schmidt was fired three months later (owing largely to
his great vision of a post-retail, digital future for music), and the new
guy had no vision. So Pakman left Bertelsmann as soon as his contract
expired, a year to the day after the acquisition. Soon thereafter, the
eCommerce group itself disappeared beneath the waves, taking MyPlay
down with it.
Today, Pakman is a partner at Venrock Associates, a New York venture capital firm, and is still an influential thinker when it comes to the
music industry (Billboard magazine considers him one of the music
industry characters you need to follow19 on Twitter). Yet despite his
love of music and his history in the business, he says he wont invest
in digital music startups and has not found a single investment in the
space worthy of our capital. In fact, when he meets promising young
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tech entrepreneurs, he actively tries to steer them away from music.

The problem, he says, is that the record labels are incapable of providing
licenses on equitable terms, because no one [at the labels] is rewarded
for cannibalizing the existing business, even if it means building a better
long-term strategy and ensuring the continuance of the sector. Consequently, getting licensed is death for startups, Pakman holds. The
economics do not allow you to build a business thats sustainable. . . .
And you end up scarred and broke at the end of it, before you even have
your product to market. To know whether consumers care. Which is,
of course, all that any innovator truly wants.
Music in the Cloud: MP3.com

In 1997, when the web was still in its infancy, Michael Robertson was a
thirty-year-old Internet entrepreneur running a fledgling search engine
business called the Z Company. One day, he was looking at the most
popular search terms on the site, and saw a curious new entrant: MP3.
Robertson recognized this as the first clue that there was a new trend to
look at,20 promptly registered the MP3.com domain, and decided to reposition his business as an online music directory under the new name.
Before long, MP3.com had expanded beyond its search engine origins to become one of the first hosting services for online music (The
concept was, were gonna be a music site that, crazily enough, actually
has music!). Anyone was free to upload a song to the site and to make
it available to other visitors (after it was vetted by site staffers to make
sure it wasnt copyrighted by another party). Tens of thousands of artists,
including many major label musicians, uploaded hundreds of thousands
of songs to the site. While there were a few little skirmishes between
the digital marketing professionals at the labels (who wanted their artists
music posted for promotional purposes) and the legal departments (who
wanted the music taken down), there were no serious legal entanglements; by and large, the marketing factions won out, given the growing
sites powerful role in generating online publicity.
MP3.com went public in 1999, raising over $370 million and setting a
new record for Internet IPOs. By this time, it was also the biggest music
website on the Internet, with over six million visitors per month. Yet
Robertson envisioned even more for the company, akin to what MyPlay
had started doing the same year. My vision of the future was, all musics
gonna live in the cloud, Robertson remembers. But it was a big data
problemhow do you get a persons music collection into the cloud?
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Although MyPlays Pakman and Camplejohn had rejected the

elegant concept of automatic streaming because they believed it would
require licenses from the major labels, Robertson wasnt so sure. Why
should consumers need permission to listen to the music they already
owned, and why should a company need permission to help them do
it? In his words, you should have a right to do whatever you want for
your personal needs with your personal property. So in January 2000,
six months after the companys IPO, Robertson launched a service called
My.MP3.com, powered by a technology called Beam-it. The service,
which was otherwise similar to MyPlay, allowed consumers to unlock a
free streaming version of any song or album merely by putting a CD into
their computers CD-ROM drive, thereby obviating the need to populate
their online libraries by uploading their collections song by song.
In Robertsons opinion, the service was a boon to the music industry
despite its lack of licenses. In the face of digital dematerialization and unbundling, he was extending the value, and therefore the market lifespan,
of the CD, providing an incentive for consumers to continue to buy them
in the digital age. He had good reason to believe this was true; MP3.com
also licensed a private-label version of Beam-it, called Instant Listening, to three online music sellers, enabling people who purchased CDs
on their sites to listen to the music via the Internet while they waited for
the CDs to arrive. According to Robertson, all three retailers saw an
immediate boost of twenty to forty percent in their sales, overnight.
Robertson wasnt concerned about his service abetting piracy. Because MP3.com required that people have a physical recording in order
to gain access to music on the site (or purchase a CD from a participating
retailer), there was even less risk of fraudulent use than one would expect
in an upload-based service such as MyPlay. As Robertson reasoned, you
had to have the CD, with all the audio. Well, you cant ask for better
security than that.
Unfortunately for MP3.com, the recording industry didnt agree with
his assessments about the services legality or its market effects. A few
weeks after the service launched, the company received cease-and-desist
orders from the major labels, soon followed by a lawsuit.21 Robertson
still believed his company was legally in the right, but he pulled the plug
on the new service, just to show good faith to the record labels. Nonetheless, they persisted in the litigation, which is unusual; typically, the
industry seeks to avoid the possibility of a precedent being set against
them. Robertson attributes this change of strategy to his companys unusually deep pockets: We had gone public, we had raised a bunch of
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money in the capital market, and they wanted to take it all. Its that
simple. . . . They know they have big statutory damage award laws, and
they can crush people with it, and thats what they do.
In May 2000a scant four months after the service had launchedUS
District Judge Jed S. Rakoff found for the plaintiffs, deciding that, because
MP3.com had made copies of the labels music in order to stream to its
customers, and because these copies did not merit fair use protection,
it had therefore infringed their copyrights and was liable for statutory
damages, which were eventually tallied at $53.4 million.22
What happened next was both predictable and absurd. Having sued
the company to the brink of bankruptcy, Vivendi Universal (the owner
of Universal Music Group, the largest major label) purchased it. The
media conglomerate paid only $5 per share for MP3.comless than a
fifth of the IPO price of $28 and less than a twentieth of its peak price of
$105, despite the fact that the company had revenues of $80 million per
year and (unlike most Internet companies) was actually profitable.
Although Robertson ultimately was able to walk away from the
company with a considerable portion of the acquisition money and the
knowledge that his technology would live on in some form (it was used,
in part, to power PressPlay, a major label initiative to sell digital music
directly to fans), the experience left him bitter. Not only had he been
branded a pirate in the court of public opinion (as well as in a court of
law) and seen a substantial percentage of his net worth evaporate, but
he had lost control of his company before he could finish building it.
More than a decade later, he still evinces both regret and anger when he
talks about the sale to Universal. It was a sad day, really, he told me.
Because I had all these great plans, visions, and we werent really able
to achieve it.23
A Covenant Not to Sue: The Curious Case of Choruss

Not all of the innovative business ideas in the digital era came from
outside the traditional music industry. In fact, one of the most interesting and potentially transformative initiatives began in 2008 as a project
within Warner Music Group. The brainchild of Jim Griffin, a veteran
music industry technologist, the aim of this project, named Choruss,
was to grant Internet service providers and their users immunity from
major label litigation in exchange for a fixed monthly fee. This covenant not to sue, as Griffin and his team called it, would cover any kind
of unlicensed distribution, including P2P. The fees would be collected
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and redistributed to rights holders based on analysis of aggregate user

activity on the unlicensed networks themselves. As long as there was a
pool of money, and a fair way to split it, as Griffin was fond of saying,
everybody could be happy.24
The Choruss team had its work cut out for it. In addition to Griffin, who served as chief proselytizer and liaison to WMG chief Edgar
Bronfman Jr. (who had earmarked about $3 million for the project), the
group also included current Warner executives (and former Gartner
business analysts) Max Smith and Jack Foreman. Smiths job was to get
other labels on board, and Foremans was to pitch the idea to ISPs. Given
the labels abhorrence of unlicensed distribution and the ISPs existing
legal immunities under the DMCAs safe harbor provision, it was going
to be a tough sell on both fronts.
The team decided that because the music industry was so horrified
of this kind of stuff, it made sense to target university ISPs before the
major broadband providers, because they were like China: lawless,
self-contained, and low-revenue to begin with. They cobbled together
some non-binding memoranda of understanding (MOUs) from the
other majors, essentially saying they had permission to enter preliminary
negotiations on their behalf, and set out to cut some deals.
At this point, Foreman recalls, I had no technology, I had no service,
I had no way to collect the money. All he did have to offer his potential
university ISP customers was a promise on the part of the labels not
to litigate against the schools or their students if they were willing to pay
up. To sweeten the deal a bit, he also pitched it as an experiment worthy
of formal research. As he describes it, he told the universities that it was
a chance to participate in something that is an academic study that we
think you can get a lot of mileage out of. The responses from universities were promising, ranging from sounds interesting to Hey, youve
gotta talk to me now! Out of a pool of about fifty initial targets, there
were seven schools that showed sincere interest and were willing to engage in negotiations (and in at least one case, to conduct formal academic
research on the business model).
Almost immediately, the negotiators ran into some serious conceptual
problems. There were pricing questions, privacy questions, and questions regarding scope of immunity (Would it apply to overseas students?
Students on vacation? Non-matriculated students?). Undergirding all of
these issues was the foundational question of whether Choruss would
be opt-in (allowing students to pay voluntarily for immunity), or opt-out
(adding the Choruss charge as a line item on students university bills).
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That was a big, big, big, big, big debate, Foreman recalls, and one
thing that never got solved.
If the service was opt-in, then the universities didnt have much to
gain; the non-participating students would still be subject to litigation,
which would continue to pose legal and technological hassles for the
schools. If the service was opt-out, then the schools would have to justify
what amounted to a tuition increase even for students who had never
used P2P. Furthermore, at the public universities, their state governments would have to ratify any across-the-board rate increases, which
could take years of complex political wrangling. On top of all this, the
labels insisted on pegging pricing to this negotiation point. If the service
was opt-out, they would agree to accept $5 per month per student (which
was more or less universally agreed to be a fair and feasible sum throughout the music industry); however, if the service was only opt-in, the
labels would expect something closer to $20 per month (which is more
or less universally viewed as excessive, and anathema to consumers).
Time was of the essence. As Foreman recalls, Choruss felt like a
house of cards. If they didnt get the project moving forward quickly,
the house would collapse, and Bronfmans support would evaporate. Yet,
in addition to the seemingly intractable impasse with the schools over
opt-in vs. opt-out, the other labels appeared to be dragging their heels
on the business affairs side.
It wasnt that they werent willing to talk. We had lots of meetings
over a very long period of time, Forman told me. We had lawyers
on the phone, had contracts drawn up, all this stuff. And we were negotiating on finer points. Yet something always seemed to prevent the
contracts from getting finalized. At one point, he says, Bronfman and
Universal Music Group CEO Doug Morris failed to meet to discuss the
project because they couldnt agree on whose office they would meet in.
When they did manage to meet, each label brought its own set of concerns to the table. Universal was worried that Choruss would set a legal
precedent validating P2P, and specifically objected to partnering with
LimeWire to track music downloads while they were litigating a highprofile case against the file sharing company. Sony was worried about a
different kind of precedentspecifically, that granting immunity to P2P
users would establish a degree of legal ownership over the music theyd
downloaded tantamount to that conferred by a retail sale.
The ultimate sticking point, Foreman says, was Chorusss foundational premise. If you ask me why did we fail, he told me, it was the
covenant not to sue. Even the indie labels and the publishers balked at
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the idea. There is no way Choruss could have worked without it; trying
to license every single track, by every single artist, composer, label, and
publisher, for all possible forms of distribution was just not logistically
possible within a reasonable time frame. Therefore, promising not to sue
for unlicensed usage was the only feasible workaround.
Yet the legal departments at the labels and publishers were loath to
give up the power to litigate. It wasnt just an essential form of business
leverage for their employers, it was also the attorneys primary function
within the organizations, and therefore their job security itself was on
the line. Foreman sees this as one of the key problems facing the music
business in the digital age. Lawyers are the hardest part of the industry,
he told me. Our impression is that they were working against [Choruss]
the whole time. Nor did the universities care for the deal as Foreman
pitched itto them, it sounded too much like extortion, a classic protection racket. At best, it sounded like vapor: everyone at the universities
kept asking, What am I getting with my $5 per month?
So it was a balancing act, and ultimately, it all came down, Forman
recalls. If we could have gotten a covenant not to sue from the majors that was signed, then we could have maneuvered our way into the
schools. Then we would have been able to set everything up. Unfortunately, it was not to be; at the eighteen-month point, it became obvious to everyone, including Bronfman, that Choruss had run its course.
Griffin and his crew approached some VCs (including the music-averse
David Pakman at Venrock) about turning it into a privately funded project, but everyone concerned realized that once it lost its affiliation with
WMG, Choruss would have an even lower chance of bringing all four
major labels on board.
The project never officially shuttered its doors, but without Bronfmans
financial and political support, Choruss more or less disintegrated. After a
year and a half of promising, cajoling, and placating, Foreman was forced
to call his would-be customers at the universities and tell them the deal
was off the table. Theyre probably not all happy with me, he acknowledges, but I did the best I could. It brings a tear to my eye.
Why license them and make a little,

when you can sue them and make a lot?
The rapid developments in digital media and networking technology
over the past fifteen years have contributed to a golden age of experimentation in music production, distribution, and audition akin to (and
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possibly outstripping) the early days of electromagnetic storage and

transmission. The concepts I have discussed in this chapter, playable
playlists, cloud music services, and blanket immunity for peer-to-peer
distribution, are three excellent examples of ways in which developers
and entrepreneurs have triedand failedto create business models
around these experimental innovations. Though not all five of the companies I profiled would necessarily have become profitable enterprises
given full participation from the music industry, there can be little doubt
that stonewalling by the major labels prevented each of them from testing their full market potential.
An interesting theme that emerges from my interviews is how consistently these innovators are inspired by aesthetic, or even altruistic, motivations. From Ouellettes desire to solve the user experience problem
to Pakmans focus on producing elegant software to Griffins proselytizing, these initiatives were driven primarily by enthusiasm for music
and technology rather than by either calculating avarice or antipathy
toward the industry. I definitely didnt start out to disrupt anything,
Ouellette told me; nor was he interested in being a millionaire. Similarly, Foreman says that in his opinion, Griffin is still so selflessly committed to the spirit of Choruss that he would die penniless if he knew
that there was a pool of money and a fair way to split it.
Yet if these innovators harbored neither ill will nor evil intent toward
the music industry (at least at the outset), why were the labels so reluctant to work with them? I asked Larry Kenswil, who worked in business
affairs at Universal Music Group for fourteen years and then ran eLabs,
UMGs digital licensing and business incubation unit, from 1997 to 2008.
As he described it to me, one of the labels primary motivations for refusing to license on reasonable terms, if at all, was their desire to cut out the
middle man completely and sell music directly to online customers (this
is something they have attempted a number of times, most spectacularly with their failed subscription initiatives, MusicNet and PressPlay,
in the early 2000s). In Kenswils words, there was a general reluctance
to outsource by licensing if you could do it yourself.25 Furthermore, the
labels feared that, if a third party successfully developed a business selling
their content, they would just become licensing entities like the music
publishers and lose the position and power they had enjoyed in the days
of cartelized distribution.
As to why the majors wouldnt even do business with Choruss, which
was itself a division of a major label, Kenswil (who was involved with
the initiative) said that if Choruss came out of Warner, that would mean
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all the other labels would be immediately suspicious of it, because of

the not-invented-here problem. This happened frequently, he told me:
One label would sort of invent something, the other labels would hate
it immediately. Down deep, they hate each other.
Kenswil and Silver also offered some valuable insight into the labels
negotiating (or anti-negotiating) methods. For example, the massive cash
advances the labels requested of companies like MyPlay and Muxtape
served many different functions. At their core, they served the purpose
that one would expect: namely, to mitigate the risk involved in doing
business with an untested licensee, and to guarantee that the labels
would see at least some money for their efforts. Yet, this doesnt explain
why the advances were often set so high as to cripple or chase off wouldbe licensees. One of their secondary purposes was apparently to provide
startups with what Kenswil calls an entrance ticket. As Silver explained
to me, we needed to make sure that we didnt do deals with companies
that had no means. So by making sure that we sucked a ton of money
out of them, in theory that meant they had means.
Silver never particularly believed this rationale. In his opinion, the
huge advances were motivated primarily by the fact that we liked cash.
Specifically, the labels viewed venture capitalfunded digital startups as
a source of easy money with few strings attached. When he was at EMI,
he told me, we talked very regularly about shaking the VC tree, and
that the dollar bills would fall very readily from the branches. And we
felt no compunction about doing that whatsoever. Similarly, Kenswil
said that labels can be very cynical in their approach to cash advances:
If they think this company has no chance of ever succeeding, and
theres some stupid money behind it, theyre just gonna pull as much
of that money out up front as possible. Because they figure theres
never gonna be anything on the back end. And theres been enough
advances paid for companies that never launched, that it becomes
something they look for: Wow, is this a company we can just fleece
an advance out of, and never have to have to worry about it again?
But when that becomes the only way youre doing business, its very
cynical and not very productive.
During the Internet boom years, Silver told me, this practice got so
out of hand that many of the majors introduced quotas, requiring executives in charge of licensing to reach revenue targets on an ongoing
basis. So if you didnt get two million dollars a quarter in business, on
the back of all these startups, there was something wrong with you, he
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recalls. And there are individuals who are now the head of digital for
large corporations who were very successful in doing that. Nor was
this money simply gravy from the labels perspectives; in at least one
financial year, Silver claims, digital music advances at EMI made the
companys budget when the retail sales would have failed . . . so the appetite was pretty keen.
Along similar lines, Kenswil confirmed what many of my other interviewees alleged regarding the motivations driving the major labels
to litigate against digital music innovators. While there are certainly instances in which the labels legitimately feel as though its the most effective method of curbing unlicensed distribution, there are other cases in
which it serves more as a form of leverage. As Ouellette recalls, It was
clear to me early on, even when I got that first call from Universal, that
its an intimidation tactic. Its all business. They want to make you feel
like you have very little control over the situation so they can work a deal
thats the most beneficial to them. Kenswil readily acknowledges this
to be the case: Yeah, thats always true in business litigation. . . . Thats
how its done. Business litigation ends up in a deal [and] the company
uses whatever leverage they have to try to make that deal as good as
possible.
As with licensing advances, Kenswil admits that the potential cash
value of a legal decision or settlement sometimes served as a financial
crutch for the major labels, undermining their interest in and ability to
seek more stable forms of long-term remuneration:
The main problem here was there had been some success on the
litigation side. To the point where, unfortunately, the money that
was coming in from some lawsuits exceeded the profits that were
being made from the actual digital businesses. And so there was
some argument to be made by those who were being paid to litigate
that litigation was a more profitable endeavor than licensing. Why
license them and make a little, when you can sue them and make
a lot?
While Kenswil has always considered this a very short-sighted way

to look at it, he also acknowledges that, in many cases, it was hard to
convince the label brass to turn down millions of dollars without a clearly
valuable alternative. The digital music startups would be either so inchoate or so unwilling to compromise with the labels on the finer points
of their business models that the litigators won the argument because
I wouldnt have a good argument internally for the business case of
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licensing to the companies. This sheds some light on Oullettes Jekyll

and Hyde experience; he was actually witnessing the labels arguing with
themselves over this very question in the course of his negotiations, a
dynamic no doubt augmented by his own unwillingness to let the labels
participate in his product design process. There was definitely a schizophrenic attitude going on, Kenswil agrees. Thats where some of the
most heated disagreements were between different factions within the
companies.
Ultimately, the major labels pathological inability to license to promising innovators on reasonable terms can be understood as a factor that
impeded the growth of the music business (to say nothing of musical
culture) for at least a decade. The cost, and the cause, are clear to those
who have tried and failed to move the industry forward. Even to this day,
Robertson argues, theres not one company who has a license for any
innovative service whos ever made any money with the record labels.
Similarly, Pakman holds that there are very few examples where youve
seen innovation and disruption from startups in licensed entertainment
models.
A cursory inspection of the digital music landscape in 2012 appears to
bear this out. A decade after MyPlay and Uplister, these models are still
seen as dangerously innovative. Playlist.com, a recent iteration of the
Uplister model, was sued by the major labels in 2008, and settled in 2010,
after which it almost immediately sought bankruptcy protection, because its $203,000 in cash reserves werent nearly enough to pay the $25
million it owed them.26 And in 2011, the launch of the big three cloud
music services from Apple, Google, and Amazon prompted Jon Pareles
of the New York Times to speculate that copyright holders are starting
to rethink their licensing terms for the cloud, offering hope to music
fans.27 Yet it took both Google and Amazon until 2012 to obtain licenses
from the majors, which meant that, for their first year out of the gate,
these services required the same lengthy upload process that MyPlay did
in 1999 (fortunately, Internet access speeds have improved since then).
And all three services, which have paid hundreds of millions of dollars in
licensing fee advances in order to offer scan-and-match functionality
to accelerate the upload process,28 still fall short of MP3.coms Beam-it
solution, in Pareless estimation. In other words, the industry has barely
progressed since the turn of the century.
Thus, it seems unlikely that, even in light of these recent developments, either the music industry or their consumers have much cause
for optimism. The fundamental tensions underpinning these historic
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failuresemphasis on short-term gain at the cost of long-term stability, infighting and mistrust combined with entrenched cartelization, and
a steady outflux of visionary executivesmay very well continue unabated until the industrys dysfunction leads to full-scale implosion. Its
not that the destination is a mystery; by now, everyone knows theres
a celestial jukebox just waiting to be switched on once the labels can
agree to some equitable terms. Its just that there doesnt seem to be any
way to get there from here. And anybody with an idea about the route
inevitably suffers the consequences sooner or later, leaving a kind of
strategic vacuum where decisive vision is most needed. Its very hard
to understand if theres any kind of an overarching strategy going on
at these companies, Kenswil concedes. Or if there ever was, I guess.
159
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CHAPTER 8
Guilty until Proven Innocent

Anti-piracy and Civil Liberties
THROUGHOUT THIS book, I have discussed numerous ways in
which the music industrys largely unfounded (and sometimes disingenuous) concerns about digital piracy, and its antipathy toward online
innovation, have harmed both the business and culture of music, contributing to the major labels own strategic and financial difficulties and
to the impoverishment of the musical public sphere. In this chapter, I aim
to demonstrate that the piracy crusades harmful effects have extended
beyond even these arenas, with negative repercussions for civil liberties,
free speech, privacy, and international relations.
What we might call the civil effects of the music industrys antipiracy efforts (often undertaken in conjunction with its political allies in
the film, software, pharmaceutical, and fashion industries) can be understood as the result of the industrys continuing alliance and coordination
with government institutions, through state and federal laws, international treaties, and trade agreements, and other mechanisms that fall
under the general rubric of policy. Indeed, rhetorical and tactical support
for the piracy crusade has been remarkably consistent within both the
legislative and executive branches of the federal government under both
Democratic and Republican leadership. Sitting senators invoke bogus piracy loss estimates, debunked by the federal governments own accountability office, to justify legislation that would allow surveillance of private
online communications in the name of protecting intellectual property.1
The Department of Justice treats copyright infringement as tantamount
to drug trafficking and child labor in its education efforts2 and has
publicly alleged, without substantiation, that P2P usage directly funds
terrorism.3 And Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, in a recent
letter to Congressman Howard Berman (author of the bill mentioned in
160
chapter 6 which would grant legal immunity to record labels who are
spying on, hacking into, and destroying the computers of suspected P2P
users), made it clear that the State Department sees no contradiction
between intellectual property rights protection and enforcement and
ensuring freedom of expression on the Internet.4
If these anti-piracy laws and policies are so clearly founded on false
premises, and so evidently inimical to the values that America holds most
dear, why has the piracy crusade enjoyed such support from such a broad
swath of lawmakers and law enforcers? The answer to this question is
complex. Part of it is that, as with many other policy matters, intellectual
property is an arcane and profoundly unsexy field, and most government
officials probably dont have either the interest or the expertise to draw
such conclusions independently. Among those in the minority who do
have a working fluency in this field, there are actually significant disputes;
for instance, as I discuss below, a number of ambitious anti-piracy bills
have been successfully blocked by legislators concerned about their civil
liberties implications. These disagreements echo the arguments within
the record labels themselves that I documented in the previous chapter.
Among those who support anti-piracy measures, there are no doubt
some who believe that their solutions are the most reasonable balance
between competing values (e.g., liberty vs. security) in the face of an
intractable and potentially devastating problem. And there are certainly
others who support such legislation for politically instrumental purposes
that cant be stated explicitly (e.g., gaining leverage in trade relations
with other economic powers such as China and Russia). But there can
be little question that a substantial portion of anti-piracy legislation and
policy is driven by lobbying, campaign finance support, and other forms
of direct influence from the music industry and its allies.
According to the RIAAs website, the organization takes an uncompromising stand against censorship and for the First Amendment rights
of all artists to create freely. From the nations capital to state capitals
across the country, RIAA works to stop unconstitutional action against
the people who make the music of our timesand those who enjoy
it.5 Public records show that the RIAA contributed over $4 million to
political campaigns between 1989 and 2011, with anti-piracy legislation
sponsors such as Congressman Howard Berman and Senators Dianne
Feinstein and Orrin Hatch among the top recipients.6 The organization
also spent over $52 million in lobbying during the same time period,
the majority of it in the past six years. Collectively, the recording industry (including labels, publishers, and trade associations) has given
GUILTY UNTIL PROVEN INNOCENT
161
Figure 10. Campaign finance and lobbyist expenditure by copyright industries, 19892011.
almost $36 million to campaigns and over $120 million to lobbyists, with
copyright, patent & trademark listed as the most frequently disclosed
lobbying issue. The broader copyright industries, which include film,
television, computer software, and publishing, have donated over $836
million to campaigns and spent nearly $1.5 billion on lobbyists (fig. 10).
For each of these industries, intellectual property is one of the top three
issues targeted by their efforts. Nor are they alone in these initiatives;
across all industries, lobbying related to intellectual property topped
$2.5 billion just during the period from 2009 to 2011, with the greatest
single contributions coming from the US Chamber of Commerce. As
media watchdog MediaMatters argues, due to the opaque nature of
lobbying disclosure forms, its impossible to nail down the total amount
of money7 spent on promoting any given law; yet, collectively, these
contributions speak volumes about the financial commitment that piracy
crusaders have made to influence policy.
While it is true that public interest groups such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Free Press, and Public Knowledge have devoted considerable effort to influencing both policymakers and public opinion against
such policies, their resources are minuscule compared with those of the
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piracy crusaders, by several orders of magnitude (collectively, they have

spent less than a million dollars on lobbying and campaign finance). And
though the technology sector sometimes breaks with the other IP-based
industries (and, at other times, joins them), it has not spent as much as
they have, and intellectual property policy falls significantly lower on its
lobbying agenda (ranking fifth for the sector as a whole).
The effects of these lobbying efforts and campaign contributions are
well documented. Often, the lobbyists just write policy on behalf of
lawmakers and government agencies. California attorney general Bill
Lockyer, who received $36,000 in contributions from the entertainment
industry in 2004, circulated a letter to his fellow state attorneys general
that same year expressing his grave concern about the dangers of P2P
technology. Wired magazine obtained a copy of the document, and
demonstrated that, based on its metadata,8 the letter had been either
drafted or reviewed by a senior vice president of the Motion Picture
Association of America.9 Although direct evidence of lobbyist meddling
such as this is fairly rare, those who work in policy circles treat it as an
open secret. As Eric Schmidt, then CEO of Google, told the audience
at a 2010 policy forum in Washington, DC, The average American
doesnt realize how much of the laws are written by lobbyists to protect
incumbent interests.10 Sometimes, the lobbying industries themselves
will even acknowledge the integral role they play in drafting and revising
legislation. During the 2011 legislative efforts to pass the controversial
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and Protect IP Act (PIPA), for instance, a
senior executive at the MPAA told the New York Times that we will come
forward with language to revise the bill in the wake of criticism, and described how lobbyists from the entertainment industry were huddling
with Congressional staff members from both parties and both the House
and Senate.11
Despite the transparency laws mandating the disclosure of financial
contributions and the prevalence with which open secrets are acknowledged (at least within policy circles), the genesis of anti-piracy laws and
policies is still frequently shrouded in darkness. For example, international trade accords such as the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
(ACTA), the Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA), and the TransPacific Partnership (TPP)all of which have been widely criticized for
their potential threats to free speech and privacyhave been negotiated
in closed, and sometimes secret, meetings that exclude the general public
and even elected representatives, while full access to the proposed treaty
text is granted to industry advisors from the MPAA and the RIAA.12
163
Recent Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests have also revealed the degree to which the US copyright czar Victoria Espinel
(former Assistant United States Trade Representative for Intellectual Property and Innovation, where she was the lead architect of
Americas IP trade policy and principally involved in WTO [World
Trade Organization] litigation against the EC and China)13 was actively
involved in secret negotiations between entertainment and communications industry organizations (including major record labels), as well
as lobbyists, to implement an unmandated, self-imposed graduated response14 Internet censorship policy at the nations largest ISPs. This six
strikes policy, dubbed the Copyright Alert System (CAS) and slated to
take effect in early 2013, slows down and potentially cuts off Internet
access for paying Internet subscribers suspected of violating copyright on
multiple occasions, without either legislative representation or judicial
oversight. Throughout the negotiations, which indicated a friendly twoway relationship between the industry and the administration, and for
which Espinel at times used her personal e-mail account, there was virtually no participation from public interest groups, let alone the public itself
or its legislative representatives.15
These are just a few examples of a much broader trend, with troubling
implications for civil liberties and democratic society in the networked
age: Again and again, a handful of major record labels, film studios and
other legacy content cartels have leveraged their strong ties with elements of the US government, as well as foreign sovereignties and treaty
organizations, to promote policies that undermine fundamental human
rights such as free speech, privacy and access to information in the name
of combating digital piracy. In the remainder of this chapter, I will review
some of the specific elements of these laws and policies, and discuss in
greater detail some of their implications for culture, society and the political process.
The Anti-piracy Agenda

Most IP policy (like policy of any kind) never appears on the public radar.
If a proposed bill gets any mainstream news coverage beyond the outlets
devoted to media, technology or law and policy, it is typically reported
on using the framework promoted by the bills sponsors, as a novel solution to an entrenched problem such as digital piracy, which, unchecked,
would destroy American businesses and American jobsor worse. Occasionally, as in the case of SOPA and PIPA in the United States and
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ACTA in Europe, an activist subset of the general public becomes sufficiently engaged to fight the bill or treaty in question, making it too
politically toxic for public officials to continue to support. But even in
these cases, the initiatives are typically seen as discrete threats, Goliaths
overcome by the collective slings of a thousand Davids.
In actuality, these initiatives are part of a continuuman everevolving set of agenda items that reappear from bill to bill and treaty
to treaty until they are legally enshrined on a global scale. Typically,
the process begins with a trade agreement, establishing minimum standards for copyright protection across the many signatories. This is often
justified in the name of harmonizing policy across regions16a necessary precaution in an era of global digital information and capital flows.
Once the agreement is in place, each signatory develops laws adhering
to the requirement of the trade pact. To the greatest extent possible, the
piracy crusaders will push legislators in the United States to outstrip the
agreements minimum requirements. Once enacted, these laws up the
ante for the piracy crusade, establishing a new set of powers and negotiating parameters, and possibly leading to new judicial rulings applying the
laws to emerging technologies and cultural practices. The content cartels
also use the threat of further legislation as form of tactical leverage to
exercise supralegal powers and privileges in their dealings with third parties (as in the six-strikes CAS agreement with American ISPs described
above). Once these new laws and business accords have been established,
the piracy crusaders return to the international table to establish updated
trade agreements with an aim to harmonize copyright protection and
enforcement at these higher standards, and the cycle repeats itself.
As this process unfolds, technological innovators, public advocates,
and political activists work to develop alternative policy and communications platforms, typically with an aim to promote a more open public
sphere in which free speech, privacy, and transparency are privileged
over the protection of vested business interests. In many ways, this dialectic resembles a game of football, with each party working to advance
the ball incrementally, play by play, over the long haul. Though, to be
fair, the process cant be reduced to a simple binary with two teams, or
even two goals; no two organizations, artists, policymakers, technologists, or public advocates share exactly the same set of interests or the
same vision of an ideal compromise. Moreover, theres no discernable
end zone in sight: although people may work toward a more open or
more secure society, most of us would consider total transparency and
total informatic lockdown to be equally dystopian prospects.17
165
With this larger framework in mind, we can examine some of the

concrete details.18 What, exactly, is the anti-piracy agenda? How have
the music industry and its allies envisioned a more secure legal and technological environment, and how have they worked to bring it about?
Scholars and organizations such as Michael Geist,19 William Patry,20
Cory Doctorow,21 Karl Fogel,22 the EFF23 and Public Knowledge24 have
examined these processes in granular detail, exhaustively comparing
each leaked draft of a particular bill or treaty and analyzing the minute
variations for their potential policy implications. It is not my aim here to
reproduce their excellent work but rather to summarize some of the key
themes that have emerged from it.
Three of the piracy crusades foundational agenda items can be traced
back to the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property
Rights (TRIPS), which established for the first time the legal prominence
of IP in international economic relations25 when it was signed in 1996,
and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) Copyright
Treaty, signed later that year. Together, they establish longer copyright
terms (harmonizing what was then the US term of an authors life
plus fifty yearsthough the United States immediately re-raised the bar,
extending it by another twenty years in 1998), require that all creative
expression be automatically copyrighted (this opt-out approach had
been law in the States since 1978), and institute anti-circumvention
standards making it illegal to disable DRM and other forms of content access control (or to help others to do so), even if its only to enable legally
established fair use. These standards became law in the United States
with the enactment of the DMCA in 1998 and in the European Union
with the creation of the Copyright Directive in 2001.
Another consistent vector of anti-piracy policy is the emphasis on
extending the penalties and scope of actions associated with copyright
infringement, essentially levying steeper punishments against a broader
range of people for doing a wider variety of things. In the United States,
for instance, the 1997 No Electronic Theft (NET) Act made noncommercial infringement a crime for the first time, punishable by years of prison
time and hundreds of thousands of dollars in statutory fines. Penalties
for both civil and criminal infringement were also increased a decade
later with the passage of the Prioritizing Resources and Organization
for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act of 2008. An early provision of this
bill would have further raised the effective penalties for infringement by
eliminating copyright laws compilation clause, which essentially says
that someone downloading an album can only be charged for a single
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case of infringement, rather than once for each song. Although this provision was dropped before the act passed into law, the question of how
to treat compilations in a digital context is an ongoing conundrum
that remains on the anti-piracy agenda.26 Most recently, the National
Defense Authorization Act of 2012 (NDAA), signed into law by President
Obama, increased penalties for selling or giving infringing goods to the
military, law enforcement, national security, or critical infrastructure.
One potential target of these higher penalties is Hyman Strachman, a
ninety-two-year-old World War II veteran profiled by the New York Times
for sending hundreds of thousands of bootleg DVDs, free of charge, to
soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.27
In addition to punishing businesses and individuals who have directly
infringed on intellectual property, recent efforts have focused on expanding the scope of what is known as secondary liability28in lay
terms, helping third parties to copy or redistribute content illegally. In
the United States, the DMCA staked out an initial compromise: While the
anti-circumvention measures stipulated by WIPO made it illegal to publish a webpage linking to a site hosting a piece of software that might be
used by someone to bypass DRM on a copyrighted file, thereby expanding potential liability far beyond direct infringement, it also stipulated
some safe harbors limiting the secondary liability of online service
providers such as ISPs.29 All it asked of these service providers in return
was that they adhere to a notice-and-takedown protocol, whereby if
a rights holder claims its work has been infringed, the service provider
must respond expeditiously to remove, or disable access to, the material
that is claimed to be infringing or to be the subject of infringing activity.
This uneasy peace didnt last long. When the US Supreme Court decided the MGM v. Grokster P2P suit in 2005, the existing concept of secondary liability didnt apply to the facts of the case, so the justices created
a new standard in its decision against the defendant, suggesting that by
inducing people to infringe copyrights, it had broken the law and was
liable for damages (an attempt to legislate this standard, in the form of
a bill called the Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act, had failed to
pass the Senate in the previous year). Since then, there have been numerous attempts to further extend secondary liability by ratcheting down or
eliminating ISP immunity. For instance, such provisions have been included in drafts of both ACTA and TPP, and a clause originally appended
to the Senates 2010 Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits
Act (COICA) would have granted ISPs immunity in exchange for censoring websites suspected of infringement by the Justice Department
167
suggesting that they risked secondary liability had they not taken such
voluntary measures.30
Several laws have sought to broaden the roles that government bodies
play in policing and punishing IP infringers, essentially diverting tax dollars toward providing the major labels and other content industries with
a free, international enforcement agency. The PRO-IP act first established a US copyright czar (technically, an Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator, or IPEC), a position appointed by the president and
confirmed by the Senate. Since then, government seizures of pirated
and counterfeited goods, and cases brought against IP infringers, have
climbed sharply. The Department of Homeland Securitys Immigration
and Customs Enforcement agency more than doubled its arrests for IP
violations between 2009 and 2011, and, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, seized 270 domain names from infringing websites in
2011 alone.31 The PRO-IP act also included a provision that would have
empowered the Justice Department to litigate civil infringement suits on
behalf of the content industries. This provision, which was eliminated at
the last minute because of veto threats by President Bush, has been on
the anti-piracy agenda for years, first appearing in the Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft and Expropriation (PIRATE) Act of 2004, which
passed the Senate but died in the House. Nor is governmental participation in policing infringement confined solely to US law; for instance, the
French Creation and Internet Law (HADOPI), adopted in 2009, created a
new government agency tasked with policing Internet service providers
and users for online copyright infringement,32 and treaties such as ACTA
and CETA expand the power of customs control in signatory nations to
search and detain goods and travelers suspected of IP infringement.
Some bills and treaties have also sought to give both government
bodies and private industry greater powers to search and surveil people
suspected of violating copyright. The Cyber Intelligence Sharing and
Protection Act (CISPA), a bill passed by the House in 2012, encourages
government agencies and private companies to share cyber threat information about Internet users activities. Given that the scope of allowable information is vague at best, and that intellectual property infringement is defined as a cyber threat, this law opens the door for millions of
Internet users to be surveilled if they are suspected of violating copyright.
It also empowers private companies to prevent users from sharing information with one another, as long as these measures are undertaken
in the name of identifying cybersecurity threats. A Senate bill called the
Strengthening and Enhancing Cybersecurity by Using Research, Educa168
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tion, Information, and Technology (SECURE-IT) Act of 2012, envisioned

as a companion to CISPA, contains similar provisions, but allows any
federal agency to use the information collected about online users in the
prosecution of any crime for which wiretaps and other forms of surveillance may legally be authorized.33 In other words, if a bill like this is made
law, private e-mails collected by the NSA in the process of surveilling a
P2P user could potentially be used as evidence in an FBI case against a
political dissident. Surveillance of suspected IP infringers is also increasingly an agenda item in foreign legislation and international treaties, as
well. For instance, in many European nations, copyright holders have a
right of information to discover the identities of, as well as personal
information about, suspected infringerseven those who havent done
so in a commercial capacity.34 And treaties like ACTA and CETA contain
provisions requiring similar policies to be enacted by all signatories.
In addition to enabling the surveillance of online users suspected of
infringing copyright, the anti-piracy agenda has also sought to give both
government and commercial institutions the ability to censor online
speech and restrict participation in the digital public sphere. While US
ISPs have voluntarily adopted a six strikes graduated response policy
restricting Internet access for suspected infringers (with some help from
the IPEC), laws such as Frances HADOPI and the UKs Digital Economy Act 2010 actually mandate that suspected infringers be deprived
of Internet access after only three (unproven) accusations of unlicensed
distribution.
While these policies censor individual users, others aim to censor specific Internet domains from the entire Internet user population. COICA
would have given the Justice Department the power to impose a blacklist on ISPs, forcing them to prevent their users from accessing a given
domain if it contained a site that contained a file that was suspected of infringing intellectual property. SOPA and PIPA would have granted similar censorship powers to the government, but with the fig leaf of judicial
oversight (all three bills were defeated, partly because of concerns about
implications for civil liberties). PIPA would also have granted some of
that power to private claimantsessentially giving entrenched interests
a mechanism to cut off traffic or funding for rival upstarts under the guise
of protecting intellectual property rights. Given the United Nations recent assertions that Internet access and online expression are fundamental human rights,35 these provisions are especially troubling.
While each of the agenda items I have mentioned has been adopted as
policy in some form, there are many other items on the piracy crusaders
169
wish list that have yet to pass into law. For instance, a joint strategic
plan submitted by the RIAA, MPAA, and others to the IPEC in 2010
included several additional policy requests, including encouraging ISPs
and network administrators to filter out copyrighted material before it
could reach their users (presumably leaving only public domain information behind); empowering customs authorities to educate travelers
about the economic costs of piracy and requiring travelers to claim pirated goods at the border; restricting trade with countries that refuse to
adopt and administer stricter anti-piracy laws; and deputizing the Justice
Department and Department of Homeland Security to develop preventative and responsive strategy around blockbuster releases by the
entertainment industry.36 Public Knowledge cofounder Gigi Sohn has
also compiled a list of bad ideas perennially supported by the piracy
crusaders.37 This list includes exempting copyright enforcement from
net neutrality policies mandating that ISPs provide equal passage for
all content regardless of its source; making it legal for content companies
to disable users computers (e.g., the Berman bill); mandating the use of
DRM by all content providers and device manufacturers (essentially outlawing the traditionally open personal computer); inserting a broadcast flag into all publicly available content, restricting the uses to which
viewers or listeners can put that content, and effectively forestalling fair
use; and remotely disabling the output ports on peoples televisions and
other media devices via selectable output control.
Finally, there is the piracy crusaders coup de grce, an Internet kill
switch enabling a government agency or official to shut down all online
communications in one fell swoop. This was first proposed in a 2010
Senate bill called the Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset Act.
More recently, it reappeared in the Cybersecurity Act of 2012, another
potential Senate companion to CISPA that specifically identified IP infringement as a cybersecurity concern and cause for action. Fortunately,
this agenda item has not yet become law in the United States; considering
the uses to which similar powers have been put in China, Iran, Egypt,
Uganda, Thailand, and Tunisia, let us hope it never does.
To summarize, the piracy crusade supports a broad and ever-expanding
agenda, the contours of which can be seen in the dozens of individual
laws and policies. Although the implications of an Internet kill switch
for free speech and civil liberties may be abundantly clear, the social
and political implications of these other policies may still be somewhat
obscure. In the next section, I discuss some of the ways in which these
existing and proposed policies pose a threat to human rights and demo170
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cratic values, and may complicate international relations for the United
States and its allies.
Social and Political Consequences

There is nothing secret about the anti-piracy agenda. While there is
no shortage of speculation on the Internet and elsewhere alleging that
policies like ACTA, SOPA, and PIPA are evidence of a governmentapproved international conspiracy,38 in actuality the piracy crusaders
have been consistent and forthright in their ambitions to prevent copyrighted content from being copied and retransmitted without permission, at any cost. Its true that treaties like ACTA and TPP and agreements like the CAS deal have been negotiated in secret, but as best we
can tell, the policies they promote have been openly advocated by the
RIAA, MPAA and their allies for at least a decade. Thus, the secrecy surrounding some of these negotiations can be better understood as a tactical measure to minimize the risk of mainstream media coverage and
public backlash. And this in turn suggests that the negotiating parties are
aware that potential backlash is warranted by their policies antagonism
to open discourse, competitive markets, and civil libertieswhich is in
its own way just as damning, if not quite as sensational, as an actual
conspiracy.
While public interest groups have largely led the charge against the
excesses of the anti-piracy agenda, there has also been some staunch
opposition within the government itself. Senator Ron Wyden, who has
been among the most active opponents to such legislation, justified his
opposition to COICA by explaining that the collateral damage of this
statute could be American innovation, American jobs, and a secure Internet.39 Even the White House has acknowledged the potential threats
of these policies if taken too far. In a public response to two petitions
against SOPA, three federal officials coauthored a letter pledging that the
president would not support legislation that reduces freedom of expression, increases cybersecurity risk, or undermines the dynamic, innovative global Internet.40 Similarly, in Britain, a recent government report
argued that copyright currently over-regulates to the detriment of the
UK and emphasized the importance of recognizing IP laws wider impacts on society, in terms of culture, education and basic human rights
such as freedom of expression.41
Yet despite these pledges, and the abundance of rhetoric suggesting
that the needs of content cartels must be balanced against maintaining a
171
robust civil society and a vital, innovative marketplace, anti-piracy policy

continues to advance the former at the cost of the latter, and there is little
reason to believe that new powers will not be abused and exploited to
their fullest extent. Warner Bros. has openly admitted to using DMCA
takedown procedures to remove content from the Internet that it didnt
own, and hadnt even looked at.42 Similarly, BayTSP, an anti-piracy firm
that polices infringement on behalf of major content companies, recently
ordered Google to remove a link to the San Francisco Chronicle website,
apparently under the mistaken impression that this news article actually infringed on copyrights associated with 20th Century Foxs film
Chronicle.43 The Department of Homeland Security seized the independent popular music site Dajaz1.com in a 2010 sweep of rogue sites
(pursuant to the PRO-IP Act), only to return it quietly to its owners a
year later, without pressing charges.44 Most recently, the entertainment
studio Lionsgate used the DMCA to censor Buffy vs Edward: Twilight
Remixed, a hugely popular parody mashup video that had been cited by
the US Copyright Office itself in a list of examples of transformative work
deserving fair use exemption.45
There can be little argument that these are instances of a consistent
pattern of collateral damage incurred in the pursuit of actual copyright
infringement, akin to dolphins caught in tuna nets. The only questions
that remain are whether the benefit is worth the cost, and who should
determine where that line falls. Metaphorically speaking, should we
continue to build stronger, more deadly nets, when the fishing industry
seems so completely unconcerned with the fate of the dolphins? What
are the odds that a law such as PIPA wouldnt result in rights holders
abusing their power to blacklist less powerful rivals and gain the upper
hand in the marketplace, to the detriment of innovation? What are the
odds that a law like CISPA wouldnt be used by government intelligence
agencies to build virtual dossiers on American citizens, even those who
havent been accused, let alone convicted, of a crime? What are the odds
that a law like the Berman bill or the Consumer Broadband and Digital
Television Promotion Act (CBDTPA, 2002), a bill mandating the use
of DRM in all digital devices and a broadcast flag in all public media,
wouldnt end up preventing millions of people from accessing and sharing information according to their fair use rights? Given the frequent
abuses of existing policies and their resulting chilling effects on both
the marketplace and the public sphere, the odds seem fairly low. Thus,
it is not an exaggeration to say that Americas foundational principles
are at stake if we pursue the anti-piracy agenda to its logical conclusion.
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Further complicating these issues is the fact that the piracy crusades
effects dont stop at Americas borders. I have already discussed the role
that international trade agreements like ACTA, TPP and CETA play in
setting, and raising, the bar for domestic copyright law. But there is another side to harmonization. Such pacts also serve the equally important role of exporting American IP policiesand therefore the interests
of American content cartels and their regulatory alliesto the rest of the
world, industrialized and developing nations alike.
These agreements are usually heralded as partnerships (e.g., the
second P in TPP), or as a chance for the United States to work cooperatively with other governments to advance the fight against counterfeiting and piracy.46 Strong anti-piracy laws that surpass those in the
United States, such as Spains Sinde Law47 and Swedens Intellectual
Property Rights Enforcement Directive (IPRED)48 have been called out
for praise in IFPI publications, as evidence of this global spirit of collaborative enforcement. Yet leaked intergovernmental communications
tell a very different story: both Sindes Law and IPRED were enacted
at diplomatic gunpoint, under pressure from the US government and
the content cartels. Diplomatic cables published in 2010 by Wikileaks
showed that the United States had threatened Spain to force them to
pass stronger copyright enforcement laws in the past.49 Then, in 2012,
the Spanish newspaper El Pas published a letter from the US ambassador
Alan D. Solomont to the Spanish prime ministers office, threatening
that if Sindes Law (which was then stalled in legislative limbo) were
not passed, the country would be placed on the USTRs priority watch
list (essentially the most wanted list for countries in breach of trade
agreements) and subject to retaliatory actions with severe economic
consequences. As a result, the incoming Spanish government fully implemented the legislation within ten days.50 Similarly, Wikileaks cables reveal that, in Sweden, IPRED was one of several laws enacted there over
a series of years, under similar threats that the country would be placed
on the USTRs watch list if it didnt comply.51
Again, these specific examples point to a larger trend: the US government, at the behest of the piracy crusaders, routinely bullies other countries into adopting anti-piracy legislation that outstrips domestic law in
its threats to free speech, privacy, and other liberties, then aims to use
these examples to push for higher levels of protection and enforcement
at home and around the world. But, in many of these nations, the costs
of adopting such policies are even greater than those faced within the
United States. For one thing, there is the matter of simple economics:
173
if the majority of revenue-bearing copyrighted content is owned by US

corporations, then a higher degree of adherence to those copyrights and
a lower tolerance for creative appropriation and technological innovation will simultaneously hurt local businesses and divert market revenues
out of the local economy.
Another threat is cultural; as the anthropologist Michael F. Brown
argues in a prescient 1998 article, the internationalization of intellectual
property laws disproportionately benefits commercial industries over
local cultural producers, and threatens to drown indigenous cultures
in the commodifying logic of advanced capitalism. The only solution,
Brown argues, is to protect the imperiled intellectual and artistic commons called the public domain from becoming erased altogether by the
relentless expansion of copyright.52 Similarly, the legal policy scholars
Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite argue that the hierarchy of cultural
production established by international copyright laws creates disincentives to participate in systems of cultural production outside of
global stardomin other words, encouraging people to eschew their
local and traditional cultural forms for the higher economic and reputational rewards promised by the content cartels.53
There are also concrete consequences related to the quality of life for
people in countries that adopt the anti-piracy agenda. One of the most
important examples is in the world of medicine. Several legal scholars,
such as Joe Karaganis and Sean Flynn,54 Jagdish Bhagwati,55 and Michael
Heller,56 have amply documented the ways in which strengthening pharmaceutical patents, banning parallel importation of lifesaving drugs,
and other agenda items tied to the piracy crusade have cost millions
of lives and damaged untold more around the world. As the Guardian
columnist Madeleine Bunting summarized in a 2001 article about TRIPS
and global IP enforcement: Put baldly, patents are killing people. But
thats not all. Intellectual property protection has become a tool to make
permanent the growing inequality of the global economy: the rich get
richer and the poor get poorer.57
Finally, it is important to remember that laws and policies have social
consequences that extend beyond their sponsors intentions, or even
their spheres of influenceand these must be tallied as costs, as well. In
the case of IP law, there are several examples of malicious private and
institutional actors taking advantage of legal powers and devices to the
detriment of both liberty and security. A recently discovered variety of
computer malware called ransomware crashes the computers it in174
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fects, then sends their owners messages claiming that the cause of the
action was online copyright infringement. Infected computers can only
be recovered if the owners pay the purported IP police: To unlock your
computer and to avoid other legal consequences, you are obligated to
pay a release fee of 50.58 Yet to the malwares hapless victims, this form
of extortion may seem benign compared with the thousands of dollars
demanded by actual rights holders alleging infringement.
I myself was targeted by a similar scam in 2011, in which phishers
(a term for e-mailbased con artists) sent me a message claiming to be
the proprietors of all copyrighted material that is being fringed upon on
your companies webste [sic], and demanded that they recover damages
from you for the loss we have suffered as a result of your infringing conduct, to the tune of $160,000. I posted the message on my blog (both as
an example of the point I am trying to illustrate here, and as a warning to
other potential recipients of the e-mail). Judging by the responses to my
post,59 this was a widely distributed message, and theres no telling how
many of its recipients clicked the link it provided, exposing themselves
to financial losses or further malware attacks.
A marginally more legitimate, but far more deadly, variety of IP law
exploitation comes in the form of copyright trolls, who use the letter
of the law to achieve ends at odds with its statutory purposenamely, as
stated in the US Constitution, 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. Instead of
promoting innovation and developing new ideas, trolls typically acquire
legal control over an existing piece of intellectual property, and use it to
extort money from people who have violated their exclusive rights. This
is hardly a rare problem; for instance, in mid-2011, the tech news site
TorrentFreak broke the story that over two hundred thousand BitTorrent
users had been targeted in mass infringement suits by copyright trolls
within the past year and a half. None of these suits had actually made it
to court; instead, the trolls used their legal leverage to identify the alleged
infringers, then offered settlements of a few thousand dollars to each
(typically cheaper than the cost of a defense lawyer). This tactic likely
yielded hundreds of millions of dollars for the trolls, while overloading
the federal judicial system and preventing real justice from being done.60
Likewise, patent trolls61 and trademark trolls62 pursue similar tactics
using those respective forms of intellectual property law, empowered
by the stricter laws, higher penalties, and amplified rhetoric of the piracy
175
crusade. A recent report by the Cato Institute calculates that collectively,

defendants lose $83 billion in wealth per year due to suits by patent
trolls in the United States alone,63 and the law professor Colleen Chien
has shown that the percentage of patent lawsuits in the United States
brought by trolls has climbed dramatically, from 23 percent in 2007 to
61 percent in 2012.64
A final concern about the misuse of the anti-piracy agenda is its potential as a form of political censorship. There are instances, as Ive described,
in which newspapers and independent music websites were silenced by
apparently overzealous piracy crusaders; while these instances were regrettable, its unlikely that the sites were targeted for political purposes.
Yet such examples do exist. We routinely hear about the censorship and
punishment of dissident bloggers and other online media sources in
countries such as China, Egypt, and Ethiopia, which offer fewer protections for free speech than are enjoyed in the United States and the EU.
Yet there is good reason to believe that anti-piracy laws have already been
used for political censorship in Western democracies, and therefore reason to be concerned that increased surveillance and censorship powers
will be used for these purposes as well.
A recent report coauthored by the Open Rights Group, a UK cyberpolicy advocate, and the London School of Economics documents over
60 reports of incorrectly blocked sites on the wireless Internet in the
first three months of 2012 alone, including several political blogs [and]
political advocacy sites.65 Similarly, the US Patent and Trademark Office
was recently caught using a filter to censor the websites of organizations
such as the ACLU, the EFF, and Public Knowledge from its public access
wifi network.66 There have also been several high-profile cases of the
DMCA being used as a tool for political censorship, as when a Mitt Romney presidential campaign video was removed from YouTube under the
pretext that it contained a short clip of President Obama singing a song
by Al Green and therefore infringed the composers copyright. As the
Stanford Law scholar Daniel Nazer summarized the incident, The upshot is that copyright holders can act as private censors, using DMCA to
silence speech at the height of a political campaign.67 Soon thereafter,
a video of Michelle Obamas speech at the 2012 Democratic National
Convention was removed by YouTube under similar false pretenses.68
These instances may not seem as dire as the harassment and imprisonment faced by dissidents such as Guo Quan and Eskinder Nega, but that
is only because some protections for free speech remain; with every advancement of the anti-piracy agenda, those protections recede.
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IN BLAKE EDWARDSS 1976 slapstick comedy The Pink Panther

Strikes Again, the bumbling but supremely self-confident Chief Inspector
Clouseau (played by Peter Sellers) gathers the residents of a posh English
estate together in a room, Agatha Christiestyle, in the mistaken belief
that one of them is an accomplice to murder. With typical Clouseau
aplomb, the inspector manages to get his hand stuck in the gauntlet of
a suit of armor, which has a mace attached to it. As he conducts his
inquiries, a bee buzzes past Clouseaus head, and in a failed attempt to
swat it, he reduces a beautiful piano sitting in the corner of the room to
smithereens. Mrs. Leverlilly, the housekeeper, protests:
Mrs. Leverlilly: You ruined that piano!
Clouseau: What is the price of one piano, compared to the terrible
crime that has been committed here?
Mrs. Leverlilly: But thats a priceless Steinway!
Clouseau: Not any more.
In his exaggeratedly outsized response to a small, if elusive, problem,

his misplaced suspicions of the people around him, his unswerving faith
in its own rectitude, and his complete disregard for the consequences of
his actions, Chief Inspector Clouseau is the perfect avatar of the piracy
crusade. No matter how deeply their proposed laws and policies undermine civil liberties, impede market innovation, and enable criminal fraud
and political repression, the music and film industries manage to justify
them in the name of preventing unlicensed copying. What is the price
of one freedom, they ask, compared to the terrible crime that has been
committed here?
Ironically, the anti-piracy agenda rarely achieves its stated goalsa
fact that is beginning to achieve some acknowledgment in policy circles.
Analyses show that high-profile shutdowns and lawsuits against services like Grokster69 and Megaupload70 failed to stop online sharing,
and may only have increased P2P activity overall (in fact, the closures
may have had negative effects on commercial content markets).71 The
much-heralded HADOPI law in France has been called a failure by
the French culture minister.72 After signing ACTA, Polish prime minister Donald Tusk declined to ratify it, arguing that his earlier support
had been a mistake.73 Soon thereafter, the European Parliament voted
overwhelmingly to reject the treaty, which it had signed (along with
twenty-two of its member states) less than a year earlier.74
Despite these signs that the tide may be turning, the piracy crusade
still has a significant amount of momentum, and a broad support base
177
within both private industry and government, fueled by a continuing

torrent of lobbyist expenditures. In my final chapter, I discuss some of
the ways in which resistance to the piracy crusade is growing among the
general population, and outline some alternative approaches that have
been promoted by both activists and lawmakers. I conclude with some
thoughts about the future of democracy and intellectual property as technological and cultural innovation continue to accelerate.
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CHAPTER 9
Is Democracy Piracy?
IN APRIL 2012, a young couple got married in Belgrade, Serbia.
The wedding video1 shows the bride and groom smiling nervously as
they stand on a dais in fancy clothes, while the crowd around them titters
and cheers and the romantic strains of an aria waft through the air. After
the groom lifts the brides veil, they exchange heartfelt vows and then
kiss. The room erupts with applause.
Despite these traditional elements, this was no ordinary wedding. For
one thing, the young couple were dressed in a postmodern mlange of
styles: the groom offset his brocaded coat, leggings, and neck ruff by
dying his short hair maraschino cherry red, while the bride wore a floorlength dress that was white on the left and black on the right with black
breast cones and a single elbow-length black silk glove on her right arm.
Far more striking was the officiant to their right: in addition to his conservative black cassock, augmented by a gray and gold stole, he wore a Guy
Fawkes mask and sported a laptop emblazoned with stickers (fig. 11).
The laptop was evidently the source of the officiants voice, which in
its computer-generated cadences asked each party to take the other as
a noble peer and to share your love, your knowledge, and your feelings . . . as long as the information exists.
These vows had never been spoken before, because this was the first
marriage ever conducted in the Church of Kopimism, a new religion
founded in 2010 by a nineteen-year-old philosophy student named Isak
Gerson. The religion is based on the principles that copying, disseminating, and reconfiguring information not only are ethically right but are
in themselves sacred acts of devotion. Kopimist philosophy also holds
that the internet is holy and that code is law2 (a phrase copied from
the legal scholar Lawrence Lessig).3
When Kopimists first filed to be recognized as an official religion in
Gersons native country of Sweden, some grumbled that they were
179
Figure 11. The worlds first Kopimist wedding, in Belgrade, Serbia, April 2012.
simply a bunch of pirates cleverly using religious protection to shield

them from liability for P2P. Yet Sweden officially recognized Kopimism
in January 2012, and today the religion boasts thousands of members
around the world, with chapters in over twenty countries. Of course,
file sharing is an important part of the Kopimist belief system and the
church openly maintains that Copyright Religion is our absolute opposite, so there can be little question that its resistance to persecution
at the hands of the piracy crusade oppressors4 is both a dogmatic and
a practical concern.
Although treating the act of copying information as a matter of
religious doctrine might at first seem to be exactly the kind of pretentious nonsense most people would expect from a nineteen-year-old
Swedish philosophy major, students of religious history will recognize
in Kopimism echoes of many other doctrines, such as early Christianity.
For instance, St. Irenaeus, a second-century theologian, would append to
his texts a formula dictating the terms on which they should be copied:
You who will transcribe this book, I charge you, in the name of our Lord
Jesus Christ and of His glorious Second Coming, in which He will come
to judge the living and dead, compare what you have copied against the
original and correct it carefully. Furthermore, transcribe this adjuration
and place it in the copy.5
This protocol was in turn copied by St. Jerome two hundred years
later in his work De viris illustribus, and, based on that work, the formula
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continued to be used by monks well into the Middle Ages, whenever

they transcribed holy scriptures.6 In fact, it was only with the introduction of movable type and the publication of the Gutenberg Bible that the
act of copying began to lose its sacred valence in the Christian world.
As I discussed in chapter 1, this innovation was also a precursor to, and
a precondition of, the development of copyright. Thus, we can understand Kopimism not as the spiritualization of something that began as
a commercial and industrial process, but rather the re-spiritualization of
a process following a long intermediary period of industrial capitalism.
I am not suggesting that the spirit of copying is identical in Irenaeus
and Kopimism; where the former was principally concerned with maintaining copy fidelity, better to transmit the word of God, the latter is
more concerned with copying for its own sake and privileges interpretation over fidelity (in the words of the Kopimist Constitution, Copymixing is a sacred kind of copying, moreso [sic] than the perfect, digital
copying, because it expands and enhances the existing wealth of information). Yet these distinctions are not so great as they may seem. Monastic
Christianity, copyright, and Kopimism can each be understood as value
systems that govern socio-epistemological processes (in plain English,
the social establishment of truth) during eras of informatic scarcity,
mechanical reproduction, and digital dematerialization, respectively.
Seen through this lens, a doctrine like Kopimism can be understood as
a serious attempt to reconcile the regulatory demands of the twentieth
centurys copyright regime with the cultural ramifications of todays
global digital information infrastructure. Put another way, while the
piracy crusade sacrifices technological innovation to preserve industrial
capitalism, Kopimism sacrifices industrial capitalism to preserve technological innovation. Thus, its theologians are correct: the two dogmas are,
in fact, absolute opposites.7
Although Kopimism appears to be growing in popularity and spreading rapidly around the globe, it is still a marginalized belief system that
thus far has been recognized as a legitimate religion in only one nation.
Far more prevalent, and politically impactful, is another recent Swedish invention: the Pirate Party. This movement, which was established
in 2006 in direct response to the international anti-piracy agenda, rapidly developed a concrete political platform and a coordinating nongovernmental organization (Pirate Parties International, established in
2010)8 and currently has affiliate parties in sixty-six nations (including
established parties in ten US states). Pirate Party candidates have won
IS DEMOCRACY PIRACY?
181
elections in several countries, including seats in the European Parliament

and the German Bundestag. By early 2012, the Pirate Party had become
the fastest-growing political group in Europe.9
In its own, less spectacular way, the rise of the Pirate Party is every
bit as incredible as the emergence of Kopimism. How can it be that a
group widely perceived as a fringe single-issue party,10 by its own accounts hobbled by a stupid name,11 and openly derided as criminal
at its core by a prominent European anti-piracy group,12 has become a
political force on a global scale in the matter of a few short years? The
legal scholar Jessica Litman attributes the partys appeal to the fact that
there are millions of ordinary people whose use of YouTube and peerto-peer file-sharing networks gives them a direct, personal stake in the
copyright law,13 in contrast to historical periods in which the average
media consumer had little or no cause to think about, let alone critique,
IP policy. To the Pirate Parties themselves, the answer is even broader,
and has less to do with copyright per se than it does with giving people a
stake in the political process. As Matthias Schrade, a German Pirate Party
operative, told the BBC after some recent electoral successes, We offer
what people want. People are really angry at all the other parties because
they dont do what politicians should do. We offer transparency, we offer
participation. We offer basic democracy.14
These two analyses are hardly irreconcilable. The tensions at the heart
of the piracy crusade are exactly the same as those at the root of the
democratic process: How can we arrive at, and enforce, a definition of
freedom that negotiates between the conflicting needs of several stakeholders? How can we express ourselves, organize our societies, and live
our lives without being constrained by those more powerful than we?
And, by the same token, how can we create and sustain a cultural and
technological environment in which innovation and commerce thrive,
thus broadening our personal and collective horizons and improving
the quality of our lives? For a growing number of people around the
world, the answers to these questions are looking increasingly less like
copyright and intellectual propertyat least, as we currently understand
them.
Copyright and Copyfight

From its origins, copyright has been viewed in America as a foundational
mechanism for a thriving, participatory democracy. James Madison
maintained in the Federalist Papers that copyright law is one of the
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rare instances in which the public good fully coincides . . . with the
claims of individuals.15 By tapping into the power of the marketplace,
the legal scholar Neil Netanel argues, the founders believed that they
could create a sphere of self-reliant authorship, free from state or private patronage . . . help[ing] to ensure the diversity and autonomy of the
voices that make up our social, political and aesthetic discourse.16
Yet, even at the dawn of the new republic, the founders recognized
that there must be some limitations on the scope of what we now call intellectual property. Thomas Jefferson wrote of the issue in an oft-quoted
letter to a Boston mill owner named Isaac McPherson: It would be
curious then, if an idea, the fugitive fermentation of an individual brain,
could, of natural right, be claimed in exclusive and stable property. . . .
Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as
an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility,
but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience
of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody.17
Thus, Jefferson (who was initially opposed to copyright laws altogether) viewed intellectual property as an artificea necessary fiction,
mutually agreed upon by the state, the citizenry, and the marketplace,
whose value was limited to its role as an encouragement for the sharing of ideas. To put it another way, the marketplace was, by virtue of
its plurality, understood to be a lesser of evils, a check on the governments potential for tyranny, and thus another instrument of leverage
for the citizenry to protect individual liberty and the integrity of the
public sphere. It was precisely this vision that has been enshrined in
the US Constitution, which paves the way for copyright by establishing
Congresss power 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.18
In the centuries since then, copyright law, media technology, and private industry have coevolved, to the point where none remotely resembles the world knownor even anticipatedby Jefferson and Madison.
Yet we have never moved beyond the original challenge at the heart of
copyright lawnamely, the task of striking the perfect balance between
government regulation and commercial privatization, ensuring the maximal freedom of speech for the public whom both sectors ostensibly
serve. Unfortunately, we now live in an age in which this dtente has
been compromised. Private industry has consolidated to a near singularity, with a handful of global corporations controlling the vast majority
of the revenue-generating music, as well as books, movies, games, and
183
other forms of creative expression, to say nothing of the consolidation of

pharmaceuticals, software patents, and other IP-based industries.
By the same token, the government has been so thoroughly penetrated by industry lobbying and other forms of corporate influence that
it has largely ceased to operate as a check or balance against the excesses
of the marketplace, and instead serves as an instrument of market hegemony, both domestically and abroad. The fact that international IP
treaties such as ACTA and TPP have been negotiated in secrecy from the
public and the news media, but with the full participation of the content
industries, is one glaring example of the warped logic that now governs
our policies. The recent US Supreme Court ruling in Citizens United v.
Federal Election Commission,19 which establishes that the First Amendment
protects the right of corporations to spend limitless amounts of money
in their efforts to influence the outcome of elections, is another. As a
result, the American public now has little hope, or even expectation, that
the will and convenience of the society will be addressed by copyright
law, or that freedom of speech applies to their own activities beyond
sanctioned commercial contexts.20
Given these developments, it is unsurprising that an increasing number of scholars and activists, and a growing segment of the public at large
in America and around the world, have come to see the piracy crusade
as anathema to what the Pirate Party calls basic democracy. But rather
than the nihilistic despair and digital barbarism21 some have ascribed
to this budding movement, both the scholarly and the popular responses
have quickly moved beyond blanket condemnations and embraced more
substantive, nuanced critiques of copyright law and IP policy. Broadly
speaking, we have begun, perhaps for the first time since the dawn of the
modern republics, to discuss intellectual property law as a vital human
rights issue rather than as a matter best left to policy wonks and experts
in private industry.
It is difficult to establish the origins of what many have come to call
the copyfight;22 some trace it back to the battles over analog reproduction technologies such as VCRs and photocopiers in the 1970s and 80s,
others cite the contemporaneous hacker culture and the development of
the free software movement,23 while yet others see the public arguments
over P2P, TRIPS, WIPO, and copyright term extension in the late 1990s
as a more appropriate origin story. Regardless of the precise lineage,
by the turn of the century it was evident to many that these somewhat
discrete concerns had begun to merge into a larger discourse. Scholars
such as Siva Vaidhyanathan,24 James Boyle,25 Lawrence Lessig,26 Jessica
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Litman,27 and Tim Wu28 published influential books and articles reframing intellectual property law as a regulatory mechanism for public and
commercial speech. Pundits like Tim OReilly29 and Cory Doctorow30
began to critique the language of the piracy crusade, celebrating the
social and economic benefits of peer-to-peer culture. Filmmakers such
as Brett Gaylor,31 Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod,32 and Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik Moltke33 created compelling visual and narrative arguments to communicate these concepts to a
broader public. And advocacy groups like Creative Commons, Electronic
Frontier Foundation, Public Knowledge, and Students for Free Culture
began to develop cohesive educational and lobbying agendas in contrast
to those of the piracy crusaders.
Most important, and no doubt in part as a result of these efforts, the
general public have become demonstrably more aware ofand more
actively engaged withthese issues in recent years. My own research has
borne this out. With my coauthors Mark Latonero and Marissa Gluck,
I fielded a survey of American adults in 2006 related to what we call
configurable cultural practicesnamely, mashups, remixes, and other
emerging digital forms of expression that blur the boundary between traditional production and consumption. This survey included an optional
write-in response, inviting respondents to share their general thoughts
about remixes and mashups. Analyzing the hundreds of voluntary written responses, we discovered that respondents had adopted several new
ethical frameworks to evaluate the validity of these new cultural practices (e.g., good copying vs. bad copying), and that most of these
frameworks had nothing whatsoever to do with the law.34 When we
fielded a nearly identical survey to adults around the globe four and a
half years later, in late 2010, we found that most of these ethical frameworks were still in place, but many respondents also explicitly critiqued
copyright law as either inadequate to the task of regulating digital culture
or as antagonistic to it.35 In other words, in a half decade, public opinion
regarding copyright (at least in a digital context) had progressed from
largely irrelevant to broken and possibly harmful. Quantitative research has produced similar results, as well. For instance, Joe Karaganis,
a researcher at Columbia University, recently found that solid majorities of American internet users oppose copyright enforcement when it is
perceived to intrude on personal rights and freedoms.36
The copyfight has already yielded some interesting political effects.
This is an issue that collapses the traditional left/right binary within both
American and international political arenas. Successful bills such as The
185
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act (CISPA) and the Prioritizing Resources and Organization for Intellectual Property (PRO-IP)
Act of 2008 were passed with bipartisan support. Yet CISPAs sister bill,
the Cybersecurity Act, was blocked by a Republican filibuster, and both
COICA and PIPA were effectively blocked by Democratic senator Ron
Wyden. Similarly, European ACTA signatories included both leftists and
conservatives, but a similarly diverse mix of politicians ultimately refused
to ratify it.
This stubborn refusal to conform to traditionally polarized party
dynamics has already become one of the hallmarks of the copyfight,
making it an unusually chaotic and unpredictable element of the political landscape. There are at least three reasons why this has happened.
First, the rapidity with which technology, culture, and industry now
coevolve has made it difficult for any legacy party to effectively integrate
a consistent IP position into its platform. For instance, should a smallgovernment, pro-business, unilateralist Republican support or reject a
copyright bill that increases federal regulation, funding, and power in the
name of protecting private enterprise at home and abroad? How would
this same hypothetical politician feel about an international trade agreement that harmonizes IP law and coordinates international policing
efforts under the auspices of a multi-governmental treaty organization?
There is no easy answer to these questions, thus the opportunity
perhaps even the necessityfor new organizations like the Pirate Party
to enter into the mix.
The second reason why the copyfight upends traditional party dynamics is its emphasis on personal liberty in contrast to institutional power.
Although copyfighters dont necessarily claim affiliation with or draw
inspiration from other political movements organized around this dynamic, they occupy a point on the political compass where [left and
right] curve around to meet in a common war cry: Get the bureaucrats,
the plutocrats and the party hacks off our backs, 37 in much the same
way that historical movements like anarchism and libertarianism and
contemporary ones like the Tea Party and Occupy do.
The third, closely related, reason for the copyfights lack of traditional
political valence is the fact that most of the anti-piracy agendas legislative and executive sponsors appear to be driven more by economic
self-interest (in the form of the lobbyist carrot and the trade sanction
stick) than by strict political ideology. These policies may be justified in
the name of partisan party platforms, but ultimately they are promoted
and enacted by bipartisan alliances cemented with common patronage
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rather than common values. To be fair, corporate influence can be seen

in the legislative resistance to the anti-piracy agenda, as well. For instance, some of the most vocal congressional opponents to SOPA were
Ron Paul, Anna Eshoo, and Zoe Lofgren,38 a politically diverse group of
politicians who also happen to be the three top recipients of campaign
finance contributions from Google in the House of Representatives.39
But this fact only further emphasizes the larger pointthat traditional
party politics play little or no role in the legislative process when it comes
to copyright policy.
The copyfight has had political repercussions outside the governmental sphere as well. It has galvanized the hacker community (historically,
one of the sectors most critical of copyright law, dating back to its role
in the privatization of computer code) in a way that few other policy
matters do. Over the past decade, hacktivism40 of all stripes, from relatively benign linking campaigns to more destructive activities such as
denial-of-service attacks, has become an increasingly common form of
protest against new anti-piracy laws, treaties, and policies. From local
matters such as SOPA in the States41 and Sindes Law in Spain42 to global
ones like ACTA,43 both government and commercial organizations have
been targeted in waves of attacks whose primary purpose and effect has
been to concentrate greater media attention on the implications of these
laws and policies for free speech and civil liberties. Of course, as with all
civil disobedience, there is an inevitable backlash; in the eyes of those
who support the anti-piracy agenda, such attacks are further proof that
pirates and hackers are antisocial forces cut from the same destructive
cloth.
Although a great many local and global groups have participated in
hacktivist attacks against piracy crusaders, the unquestionable leader and
focal point for such strategies is currently the amorphous hacker collective Anonymous.44 With their theatrical reappropriation of the Guy
Fawkes mask from the 2005 film V for Vendetta and their cryptic motto,
We are Anonymous, We are Legion, We do not forgive, We do not forget, Expect us!,45 Anonymous have captured the public imagination and
served as a vital educational resource and rallying point for copyfighters
and activists outside of the hacker community. In this respect, they play
a similar role to that of the Yippies and the Students for a Democratic Society during the 1960s antiwar, free speech, and civil rights movements
in the United States.46 Much as these groups did, Anonymous provides
those beyond its ranks with a symbolic lexicon that can be applied as a
kind of political shorthand for complex technology and policy matters.
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Figure 12. Polish legislators wearing Guy Fawkes masks in Parliament. AP Images,
reproduced with permission.
In some cases, this symbolism has even been adopted by policymakers

themselves, completing a circuit of sorts. For example, in January 2012,
days after hacktivists took down the Polish government website and replaced it with text such as Stop ACTA!, Prime Minister Donald Tusk
is a bad person!, and You wont take away human rights!,47 over thirty
Polish lawmakers donned Guy Fawkes masks in the Polish Parliament
to protest the treaty48 (fig. 12) while thousands of citizens rallied in the
streets (many of them wearing the masks as well). Ultimately, Tusk was
compelled to abandon his pledge to sign ACTA, which was in turn a
decisive factor in the broader EU rejection of the trade agreement.
Alternatives to the Piracy Crusade

The bulk of this book has focused on debunking the arguments at the
heart of the piracy crusade, and documenting the social and political
costs of the anti-piracy agenda. Yet I would be remiss if I did not devote
at least a part of my final chapter to discussing some of the alternative
ideas that have emerged in response to these policies. But before I review these ideas, it makes sense to begin with a few first principles.
What are the social benefits of intellectual property? What problems
does it exist to solve, and how well does it do so? Only by keeping these
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ends in sight can we evaluate the different means that have been proposed to achieve them.
As I discussed earlier, one of the primary functions of copyright, patents, and other species of IP is to incentivize creators to share their ideas
with the world. A second, related function is to provide such creators
with a means to capitalize on their innovations. In addition to providing
creative incentives, this also speaks to a basic expectation of fairness
that is commonly invoked in capitalist societiescreative work, like all
other forms of labor, should be remunerated.49 A third function has to
do with the reputational economy, rather than financial remuneration:
copyright allows creators to take credit for their work, which has social and
psychological benefits in addition to financial ones. A fourth function of
copyright is to grant creators some degree of control over how their work
is used by third parties. For instance, by a provision in his will, the late
Adam Yauch (a.k.a. MCA) of the Beastie Boys has used his copyrights in
the bands repertoire to prevent posthumously the songs being used for
advertising purposes,50 a stipulation in keeping with his lyrical pledge
(in Putting Shame in Your Game) not to sell my songs for no TV
ad. A fifth function, mentioned earlier in this chapter, is to provide the
citizenry with a mechanism for checks and balances against both governmental and commercial encroachment on free speech. A sixth function
of copyright is to incentivize industrial organizations to exploit creative
work, thereby both spreading new ideas and generating new wealth for
the economy. This is a hefty load for one law, or more precisely, one set
of laws and policies, to carry. Inevitably, in the shaping and execution
of these policies, one function must be weighed against, and privileged
over, another. As I hope I have demonstrated in this book, the problem
with the piracy crusade isnt copyright per se, but rather the fact that it
overwhelmingly privileges the sixth function, often to the detriment of
the first five.
One of the earliest modern efforts to reprioritize the functions of copyright came in the form of free software licenses (sometimes used interchangeably with the term open source).51 In what has now become the
stuff of geek legend, the computer hacker Richard Stallman pioneered
this new breed of legal instrument in the 1980s with the development of
the GNU General Public License (GPL).52 Stallman had been frustrated
when the de facto public domain that had characterized the software
coding community from its earliest days began to be privatized; not
only was code being copyrighted, but commercial interests were shipping software without granting purchasers access to the source code,
189
which would allow them to make their own edits and amendments. As
a result, much of the code that Stallman and his peers had written, with
the expectation that it would remain publicly available to the hacker
community, was being integrated into commercial projects and essentially locked behind digital bars. Stallmans solution to this problem was
a stroke of genius: he would turn copyright inside out (or backward;
this solution is often referred to as copyleft), using a license of his own
devising to force anyone who used his code to make it available to third
parties on the same terms.53 The GPL has become a canonical text within
the hacker community, and today it and dozens of similar licenses have
been used to establish openness for millions of works, including some
of the worlds most popular software programs and web destinations.
More than a decade after Stallmans revelation, the law professor Lawrence Lessig recognized that culture at large faced challenges similar to
those Stallman had identified in the field of computer code. Between
copyright term extension, the DMCA, and other elements of the budding piracy crusade, Lessig worried that the cultural commons, or the
shared knowledge and experience of our society, was being increasingly
encroached upon by private interestseven as new digital communication networks were providing us with the power to share ideas on a scale
hitherto unimaginable. Lessig foresaw that the combination of stronger
copyright and more powerful networks would soon turn virtually everyone into pirates by default, so he set out to create a legal inoculation in
the form of an open license for creative expression.54 The resulting legal
instrument, which is called a Creative Commons (CC) license,55 is similar
to the GPL in that it gives musicians, authors, artists, and other creators
the opportunity to use their copyrights as a means to encourage, rather
than discourage, the reuse and redistribution of their work. One of its
most important innovations is that it gives the author herself the ability
to prioritize between copyrights various functions; for instance, while
one breed of CC license allows any kind of use as long as attribution is
granted to the original creator, another allows only noncommercial uses,
and yet another prohibits derivative works. In the decade since the CC
license was developed, hundreds of millions of works have been released
under its terms, including the White House website, Wikipedia, music
by popular artists including Nine Inch Nails, Beastie Boys, and Snoop
Dogg, and this book.56
Where open licenses such as the GPL and CC attempt to address the
shortcomings of copyright by augmenting it contractually, others have
proposed that intellectual property law simply be abolished altogether
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and replaced with a new regulatory system. For instance, the Dutch researchers Marieke van Schijndel and Joost Smiers have proposed that all
creative works be immediately absorbed into the public domain (a legal
concept that describes information that cannot legally be propertized,
although the authors explicitly synonymize it with the commons).57
Van Schijndel and Smiers envision three possibilities for creators
under this solution. For those in relatively low-investment, low-risk fields
(such as musical performers), the authors suggest that a first-mover advantage will allow innovators to benefit, simply by virtue of being reputationally and economically associated with the new ideas they promote.
True, performers cant expect royalties from recordings, they argue, but
the loss of these typically meager sources of revenue will be offset by
increased income from other sources, such as live performances. For
creators in higher-investment or higher-risk fields (such as cinema, book
authorship, and music composition), the authors suggest a usufruct, a
legal instrument that predates copyright by centuries. In the present context this term means that although the creator doesnt technically own
a work, she retains the exclusive right to exploit it commercially for a
limited period of time (the authors suggest a year). This is a less radical proposal than it may seem; in its emphasis on temporary rights of
exploitation rather than permanent rights of property, the Jeffersonian
and constitutional approach to copyright more closely resembles such a
usufruct than it does modern copyright law. Finally, van Schijndel and
Smiers suggest that works that may be difficult to exploit commercially
can be subsidized by the government, further justifying their public domain status. Again, this proposal is hardly radical; even in America, the
land of free enterprise and low taxes, we currently spend over $150 million annually on the National Endowment of the Arts, one of many public sources of funding for creative works.
While ideas such as open licenses and the usufruct system have
emerged from outside traditional government and policy circles, alternatives to the piracy crusade have been proposed by lobbyists, legislators,
and regulators as well. In the United States, the Pirate Party advocates
reducing copyright terms from their present length (an authors life plus
seventy years, or ninety-five years for a commercially funded work-forhire) to the original fourteen-year term that existed when copyright
was first introduced in this country.58 The party has also advocated for
the abolishment of the DMCA (hence the title of its recent publication,
No Safe Harbor), and for the expiration of unproductive patents after four
years.59
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Members of traditional political parties have also proposed their

own solutions. For instance, Republican Congressman Darrell Issa has
advocated strongly for a Digital Citizens Bill of Rights to guide IP- and
communications-related law and policy. This approach strikes a very
different balance from the anti-piracy agenda, establishing freedom,
openness, and equality as its first three principles, and relegating
property to the tenth, and final, place. Together with Democratic senator Ron Wyden, he has promoted legislation called the Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital Trade (OPEN) Act in both houses of
Congress as an explicit alternative to SOPA, PIPA and similar legislation.
In an effort to deliver on the spirit of the legislation and to highlight its
contrasting values with the lobbyist-driven anti-piracy agenda, Issa has
also made drafts of the law available for public comment on a dedicated
website.60
The Republican Party itself has also flirted with the idea of making progressive copyright reform an element of its national platform. In November 2012, less than two weeks after the partys presidential candidate had
lost in nationwide elections, owing in part to a perceived lack of original
ideas from the candidate and the GOP at large,61 the Republican Study
Committee (RSC) posted a policy brief to its website titled Three Myths
about Copyright Law and Where to Start to Fix It. The brief, which
critiqued existing copyright laws for hampering cultural innovation, market value, and scientific inquiry, argued strongly for a number of drastic
reforms, including steep cuts in statutory damages, expansion of fair use,
punishment for false copyright claims, and heavily limited copyright
terms, with a default length of twelve years and a maximum length of
forty-six years, requiring several increasingly costly renewals.
Under reported pressure from content industry lobbyists, the RSC
removed the brief from its website the day after it was posted (which
happened to fall on a Saturday; apparently, it was too volatile to leave
on the site until Monday).62 By way of explanation, the RSCs executive director, Paul Teller, wrote a short memo, sent from his BlackBerry
phone, explaining that the brief had been published without adequate
review and apologizing for not taking care to approach the subject of
copyright reform with all facts and viewpoints in hand.63 A few weeks
later, Derek Khanna, the staffer who had authored the policy brief, was
summarily fired. In a subsequent interview with Ars Technica, Khanna
clarified that, despite Tellers claims, the memo had gone through exactly the same review process as other RSC publications.64 At the time
of writing, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio, the chairman of the RSC, has re192
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ceived $98,150 in campaign finance contributions from the television,

movie, and music industries since 2005.65 This episode illustrates some
of the reasons that progressive copyright reform remains politically challenging within contemporary Americas lobbyist-saturated political environment.
Fortunately, government-driven alternatives to the piracy crusade
have begun to emerge elsewhere around the world as well. Like those
in the States, they run the gamut from flat-out rejection of the anti-piracy
agenda to more conciliatory approaches apparently aimed at furthering
industry interests while forestalling the kind of activist backlash spurred
by SOPA, PIPA and ACTA. In the UK, a series of studies released in
2012 by the governments Intellectual Property Office have identified the
music industry as a primary example of the mismatch between copyright
law and digital commerce and culture. The reports suggest that an independent, industry-funded digital copyright exchange be established
in order to streamline and simplify the process of using copyrighted
material in a variety of contexts, ranging from educational to religious
to commercial settings. This solution is presented as a quid pro quo deal
for the content cartels in their efforts to develop ever stronger copyright
enforcement: If the creative industries ensure that they have done all
they can to make licensing and copyright work easier for rights users and
therefore consumers, then the ball is firmly at the feet of the politicians
to ensure appropriate measures are in place to reduce the incidence of
copyright infringement on the web.66
Other examples abound, from Europe to Asia to South America. A
Dutch government directive instituted in 2006 prevents enforcement
authorities from pursuing criminal prosecution for online piracy.67 In
2011, the Swiss government announced it would not pass stronger IP
laws and would allow unlicensed downloading for personal use to remain legal, because its priority was to avoid limiting access to information through copyright regulations.68 In Brazil, despite the maximalist
approach to copyright protection that currently dominates69 its laws
and policies, there have been several government-driven efforts to mitigate the effects of the piracy crusade. Most notably, musician Gilberto
Gil, who served as minister of culture from 2003 to 2008, established
a relationship between Brazil and Creative Commons that included
placing government websites under an open license and initiating unprecedented open public debates on the social and economic impact of
copyright legislation (in 2011, the incoming minister of culture, Ana de
Hollanda, issued an order to remove the CC license from government
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websites).70 Brazil has also introduced some intriguing copyright reform

proposals, including a bill that would have issued penalties and sanctions against companies that used DRM to prevent fair use or access to
the public domain71 and a 2010 policy rejecting DMCA-style notice-andtakedown policies and instead requiring a court order for infringing material to be removed from the Internet at the behest of rights holders,;72
most recently, the Marco Civil da Internet, a bill that would establish a
digital bill of rights similar to those outlined in Americas OPEN Act, has
been making its way slowly through the nations legislature.73
In India, the government has spent the past few years in a sustained
court battle with multinational pharmaceutical conglomerate Novartis
over its 2006 decision to reject a patent for life-saving antiretroviral (ARV)
drugs that battle AIDS and related diseases. Novartis argues that, under
the TRIPS agreement, India is obliged to grant the patent. The Indian
government argues that the drug in question is minimally differentiated
from existing compounds, and therefore that granting the patent would
only serve the function of building Novartiss profits while inflating the
cost of these life-saving drugs beyond a price point that most infected
people can afford.74 Given the fact that about 2.4 million Indians are currently living with HIV, it is no exaggeration to say that millions of lives
hang in the balance. At the time of writing, the Indian Supreme Court is
weighing its decision, following final arguments in the case.
In short, the alternative to the anti-piracy agenda isnt simply lawlessness, anarchy, or socialism as its proponents routinely suggest. Independent researchers and international governments alike have proposed,
and in some cases enacted, a diverse array of alternate laws and policies
that strike a different balance between the competing mandates of intellectual property, privileging such values as freedom of speech, access to
knowledge, and quality of life over the profit motives of the cartelized
industries that lobby for, and disproportionately benefit from, maximalist
copyright and IP laws. The fact that so many independent sovereignties have challenged the piracy crusade on their own terms, according
to their own needs, and in spite of threats of trade sanctions and other
diplomatic and market pressures lends credence to the point of view that
harmonization, far from providing a convenient and mutually beneficial one-size-fits-all platform for international IP enforcement efforts, can
best be understood as an instrument of American industrial hegemony.
From this, we can draw two conclusions. First, resistance to the antipiracy agenda shouldnt be interpreted as a de facto attack on American
interests, capitalist values, or the rule of law. To the contrary, in almost
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all cases it amounts to a political argument in support of basic human

rights and equal opportunity in both the political and commercial
sphereswhich are themselves foundational American values. Second,
the fact that no single solution emerges in contrast to the anti-piracy
agenda shouldnt be taken as evidence of a lack of viable alternatives. A
key fallacy of the piracy crusade is the notion that a single set of laws and
policies should govern all uses of information, by all people, in all social
contexts, in every nation. As its more astute critics routinely observe, a
better approach is a multiplicity of approaches, granting governments,
markets, and societies the leeway to regulate information sharing on
their own terms, in response to the unique challenges and value systems that inhere to their particular spheres. Simply speaking, why should
Hollywood set the terms by which the other seven billion people on the
planet can communicate?
Conclusion: Beyond Copying, Beyond Copyright?

I have written this book secure in the knowledge that it will soon be
obsolete. Its not just because the laws, policies, and technologies I discuss change so rapidly that todays breaking news is tomorrows ancient
historyalthough this is certainly the case. Far more important is the
fact that we are likely approaching a sociotechnological event horizon
of sortsa point beyond which the origins of intellectual property law
become so remote and obscure that there will be little purpose in debating its enforcement or amending its architecture. To put it plainly,
we are on the verge of an era in which the concept of copying has no
meaning, and therefore in which copyright exists only as an instrument of hegemony.
This change has been a long time in the making. As a great many
scholars have observed, and as I have reiterated throughout this book,
copyright law has its origins in a bygone age at the dawn of industrial capitalism and the modern concept of the individual. As the printing press
has been supplanted (or augmented) by electronic and digital media, and
as commerce and culture have widened to encompass a global scale, the
notion of a single sovereignty granting a single publisher the exclusive
right to distribute a single work by a single author has come into evergreater conflict with the reality of our daily lives as communicants, audiences, producers, and consumers.
Copyright law has evolved and expanded over the centuries, to include new methods of storage and transmission and to accommodate
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new modes of commercial exploitation, but it has always remained

rooted in the basic metaphor of a publisher distributing a discrete work
printed on paper for sale to a reader. Even today, the letter of the law
limits protection to original works of authorship fixed in any tangible
medium of expression.75 While its a stretch to claim that certain forms
of expression (say, a live musical performance transmitted by satellite
radio) are fixed or tangible, we have managed to account for this
disjuncture by abridging and interpreting both the letter and the spirit of
the law with increasing flexibility.
Seen from this vantage point, we can understand the piracy crusade
of the past fifteen years as merely the latest iteration of this trend. Digital
media further dematerialized the process of producing, distributing, and
consuming information, so copyright laws have been revised with an
even broader interpretation of what authorship, fixed, and tangible
mean in this context, and with stronger policing and steeper penalties to
prevent both businesses and individuals from crossing the increasingly
porous boundary between use and theft.
The problem is, the metaphorical flexibility of copyright is now
strained to breaking point,76 on two fronts. First, new technological advances threaten to eradicate completely the distinction between author
and audience (one of the primary conclusions of my first book, Mashed
Up), fixed and fluid, and tangible and intangible. Second, maximalist
copyright laws such as those promoted by the anti-piracy agenda can
only be strengthened so much before they amount to total control over
the flow of all information between all individuals.
On the first front, lets take as an example the current rage of the geeky
DIY set: 3D printing. This technology enables anyone with a printer to
create a physical object, on any scale and from a variety of possible materials, based on a digital model of that object. Over the past few years,
the price of 3D printers has begun to descend from industrial to hobbyist
levels, further spurring creative tinkerers to expand the range of conceivable uses for the technology. In 2013, it seems to be poised on the brink
of (early) mainstream adoption. At this point, it is easy to imagine a near
future in which people will routinely print anything from replacement
machine parts to furniture to items of clothing using inexpensive and
ubiquitous home devices.
The question is, what role would intellectual property play in such
a world? Today, copyright doesnt cover industrial or conceptual design, such as food recipes and fashion (and these industries have arguably
thrived as a result).77 Would the law be widened further to protect the
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interests of those who seek to privatize and monopolize the library of

virtual 3D models, thus placing an entire new universe of creative expression into private (and most likely corporate) hands and removing it from
the public domain? If not, how would the law treat a virtual model of a
copyrighted vinyl album or a sculpture? Would transmitting or printing
such a model amount to a violation of copyright? More important, would
it be possible to differentiate between protected and unprotected models
any more easily than it is to distinguish the legal and illegal 1s and 0s currently transmitted over the Internet? And what kind of surveillance and
censorship would be justified in pursuing such an end?
Lets take the question a bit further. Two of the fields of scientific
research that are currently considered to be among the most promising
sources of future innovation and social transformation are nanotechnology (the construction of machines and functional objects using microscopic building blocks) and biotechnology (the construction of machines
and functional objects using living organisms, DNA, and/or the other
rudimentary elements of life). If we extend the hypothetical questions
surrounding 3D printing to each of these fields, we face similarly intractable problems, but on a far more sweeping and profound scale. There
has already been significant controversy over whether, and under what
circumstances, a DNA sequence can, or should, be patented or copyrighted,78 and the matter is currently being addressed by the US Supreme
Court.79 Yet we have barely scratched the surface of the potential power
and range of social applications of these technologies. If intellectual property maximalism is applied to the transmission and use of nanomachines
and genetic sequences, will we be able to alter and adorn our own bodies,
seek and receive medical treatment, or even eat and reproduce without
committing some form of piracy?
These are not academic concerns or simply my clever attempt at
the rhetoricians old trick of reductio ad absurdum. To the contrary,
the problem I have just outlined in broad strokes is so significant that I
am most likely erring on the side of understatement. The larger point
is inescapable: our degree of technological mastery over our physical
surroundings and our neurological and biological functions seems likely
to grow drastically in the coming decades, to the point where it will
resemble the fluidity and dynamism we have already come to expect
from information processing on our pocket-sized computing devices and
via the Internet. Not only will atoms increasingly be used like bits, to
use Nicholas Negropontes80 helpful, if reductionist, terminology; the
distinction itself will become more and more functionally irrelevant as
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ubiquitous digital networking transmits instructions for molecular and

genetic sequencing between billions of peers around the globe, and as
nano- and biocomputers increasingly supplant traditional silicon-based
processors in our homes, businesses, and bodies.
This leads us to the second front: copyright maximalism. We already
live in world in which virtually everything that we fix in a tangible
medium is automatically subject to copyright for a practical eternity.81
Each day, in our normal course of actions, we casually (and largely unwittingly) commit both civil and criminal infringement that, according
to the legal scholar John Tehranians estimates, makes every one of us
technically liable for billions of dollars in damages per year.82 Before the
age of the Internet, this fact may have been of theoretical concern, but
it had no practical importance; after all, no rights holder could possibly
surveil the entire populace day in and day out, keeping track of every
infringing behavior and exacting the appropriate fines in a legal setting.
In fact, it may be argued that such casual piracy was always assumed
to exist, and that the frameworks for copyright enforcement and punishment took this into account.
This dynamic began to change as computer networks became increasingly pervasive, and thus increasingly central to both our business and
personal lives. As e-mail and social media have replaced the postal service and the water cooler as the primary interpersonal communications
platforms for hundreds of millions of people, not only has our rate of infringement climbed (retelling a Jay Leno gag at the water cooler is legal,
but posting it to a Facebook page is not), but our actions have become
far more subject to surveillance, and we ourselves have become far more
identifiable to the injured parties. During the same years, the piracy
crusaders have developed a legal infrastructure that not only legitimizes
such surveillance, but makes it easier for rights holders (and their representatives) to target casual infringement in mass lawsuits, and to settle
with the defendants without ever having brought the cases to court.
And these powers have already been exploited in the United States and
around the world to stifle innovation and competition, censor political
speech, and bully the general public.
As we approach the post-silicon era (for lack of a better term), these
problems are likely to be compounded even further. As the tools for
shaping our physical environments and biological destinies come to look
increasingly like those we now use to create, alter, reproduce, and transmit our text, photos, videos, and music, what aspect of the human experience will not be, in some way, constituted by the act of copying? What
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region of our personal and public lives will not therefore be subject to
copyright, or to some similar legal constraint, and to all the opportunity
for exploitation that comes with such constraints? It sounds like the plot
of a dystopian science fiction film, but its clearly the direction in which
were headed.
Futurists like Ray Kurzweil83 have charted the course to the singularity of man and machine in excruciating detail, and they look forward
devoutly, with a messianic fervor, to the day when we can transcend
biology. I have spoken on several occasions to one of the Singularity
movements chief proselytizers, and he has described for me his vision
of the not-so-distant future in which the human spirit, liberated from the
bonds of mortality and corporeality, is free to explore the limitless possibilities of the known and unknown universe for all eternity.
To me, this future sounds at best lonely and at worst totalitarian. If
all of life is code, and code is law, and life, code, and law are undying,
how can we avoid reaching one of two chilling ends? Either the power to
shape our destiny rests in our own (virtual) hands, and we each become
singular gods in our own monotheistic universes, or there is some system
of centralized authority that doles out such power, and we must spend
eternity subject to its unfathomable whims and biasesin other words,
with a machine as our god (and devil).
If there is a third way, I believe it looks a lot like Kopimism. Far better
to function as a noble peer, sharing information in the form of love,
knowledge, and feelings with the other peers in the universe-network,
than to go it alone or to toil eternally under the yoke of some heartless
algorithm.
In the meantime, there are more pressing concerns, and much work to
be done. Long before we achieve anything close to singularity, the piracy
crusade threatens to undermine our societies, to crash our markets, and
to privatize completely the most personal form of public expression
our music. In the interest of both present and future, we need to rethink
some of our basic assumptions about business, law, and culture. How
much of a threat is piracy in the form of online sharing, compared
with the costs weve already seen to innovation, civil liberties, and public
discourse in our failed efforts to stop it? Will stricter copyright, stronger
enforcement, and harsher penalties really aid creative expression and the
industries that exploit it, or will it simply open the door to more abuse
and plunge us deeper into cultural paralysis?
As I have argued throughout this book, the answers to these questions
are clear if were willing to see them. The entire rationale for the piracy
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crusade is built on the flimsiest of foundations. The willful blindness

that leads our governments to support the anti-piracy agenda despite
its obvious flaws and faults is evidence of a genuine dysfunction within
both the private organizations that lobby for these policies and the state
institutions that enact them.
Fortunately, there are many viable alternatives we can pursue if we
have the political will. A good starting point would be to enact a binding
digital bill of rights akin to the one promoted by Congressman Issa and
Senator Wyden, and to develop laws, treaties, and international policies
that adhere to its principles. A more ambitious aim would be to reverse
the pendulums swing, restricting the term of copyright, and ceding a
wider swath of cultural behaviors to fair use and the public domain. Most
important, we need to abandon the ideology of the anti-piracy agenda
and to look with fresh eyes at the complex causal relationships among
information sharing, commerce, and society. To reduce all cultural activity to a stark permission/piracy binary is a form of discursive impoverishment that renders intelligent decision making practically impossible.
And, given whats at stake, we need to make intelligent decisions now
more than ever. In short, we need to end the piracy crusade as though
our lives depend on it.
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The Piracy Crusade!
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N OT E S
Introduction: Piracy Crusades Old and New

1. My sources for the histories of Genoa and Tunisia in this section are
Harry Hazard, A History of the Crusades, vol. 3: The Fourteenth and Fifteenth
Centuries (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1975); and Barbara Tuchman,
A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century (New York: Ballantine Books, 1978).
2. Hazard, History, 481; Tuchman, Distant Mirror, 463.
3. Tuchman, Distant Mirror, 463, 468.
4. Ibid., 474.
5. Hazard, History, 482.
6. Ibid., 483.
7. Tuchman, Distant Mirror, 462.
8. Ibid., 460.
9. Matthew Belloni, Supreme Court Refuses to Hear Joel Tenenbaum
Appeal in Music Piracy Case, Hollywood Reporter, May 21, 2012, www
.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/supreme-court-joel-tenenbaum-piracy-327266.
10. Raphael Minder, Pressure Grows on Spain to Curb Digital Piracy, New
York Times, May 17, 2010.
11. Tina Johnson with Robert Mancini, Court Rules MP3.com Violates
Copyrights, MTV News, April 28, 2000, www.mtv.com/news/articles
/1432447/court-rules-mp3com-violates-copyrights.jhtml.
12. Plaintiffs post-trial brief concerning remedy and defendants first
amendment defense. Universal City Studios, Inc., et al. v. Eric Corley a/k/a
Emmanuel Goldstein and 2600 Enterprises, Inc., August 8, 2000, www.2600.com
/dvd/docs/2000/0808-brief2.html.
13. The Six Business Models for Copyright Infringement, study
commissioned by Google and PRS for Music, June 27, 2012, www.prsformusic
.com/aboutus/policyandresearch/researchandeconomics/Documents
/TheSixBusinessModelsofCopyrightInfringement.pdf.
14. MP3.com Settlement: RIAA Hails Victory for Creative Community &
Legitimate Marketplace, RIAA.com, June 9, 2000, http://riaa.com/newsitem
.php?id=81022351-3D35-EEE9-B26B-F9DF3239CCDB.
15. Court Rejects Napsters Case Rehearing, RIAA.com, June 26, 2001,
http://riaa.com/newsitem.php?id=D55C5B4C-9F5B-7142-81EB-1AF69E3A897A.
16. RIAA Statement on MGM v. Grokster Supreme Court Ruling, RIAA.com,
June 27, 2005, http://riaa.com/newsitem.php?id=DE79FC7C-A22E-931E-CF31
-59E03950450C.
201
17. Federal Court Issues Landmark Ruling against LimeWire, RIAA.com,

May 12, 2010, http://riaa.com/newsitem.php?id=B78C8571-0E8D-5861-27C6
-4D2178AEB7D1.
18. See, for instance: Derek Slater, Urs Gasser, Meg Smith, Derek Bambauer,
and John Palfrey, Content and Control: Assessing the Impact of Policy Choices
on Potential Online Business Models in the Music and Film Industries, Berkman
Publication Series Paper 2005-01 (2005), http://ssrn.com/abstract=654602; Mike
Masnick, Hadopi Accused of Massaging the Numbers to Make Anti-piracy
Activity Look Better, Techdirt, April 4, 2012, www.techdirt.com/articles/
20120402/12145518337/hadopi-accused-massaging-numbers-to-make-anti
-piracy-activity-look-better.shtml.
19. Obviously, colonization and industrialization came at their own significant
costs for millions of enslaved and exploited people around the globe, in addition
to many other well-documented global and ecological consequences. I am not
suggesting that these were positive developments in any sense other than the
economic and political benefits that accrued to the European powers.
20. Daniel Goffman, The Ottoman Empire and Early Modern Europe (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2002).
21. Nancy Baym, Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Cambridge: Polity,
2010).
22. David Karpf, The MoveOn Effect: The Unexpected Transformation of American
Political Advocacy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012).
23. MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005).
24. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Afterword: Critical Information Studies, Cultural
Studies 20, no. 23 (2006): 292.
25. The books online draft is still available to read and comment on at
http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/mcpress/piracycrusade/.
26. Details of the licenses terms are available at http://creativecommons
.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/.
27. John Williamson and Martin Cloonan, Rethinking the Music Industry,
Popular Music 26, no. 2 (2007): 305.
28. Patrik Wikstrm, The Music Industry: Music in the Cloud (Cambridge:
Polity Press, 2009), 12.
29. Elisabeth Kbler-Ross, On Death and Dying (London: Routledge, 1969).
1. Stacking the Deck
1. The term was coined by Pierre Bourdieu in his essay Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction, in Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change:
Papers in the Sociology of Education, ed. Richard Brown, 71112 (London:
Tavistock, 1973)
2. Aram Sinnreich, Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable
Culture (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2010).
3. Mark Changizi, Harnessed: How Language and Music Mimicked Nature and
Transformed Ape to Man (Dallas: BanBella Books, 2011), 203.
4. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (Toronto: Vintage
Canada, 2008).
202
NOTES TO PAGES 519
5. Daniel Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
(New York: Dutton Adult, 2006).
6. Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1961).
7. John Blacking, How Musical Is Man? (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1973).
8. Edward Schieffelin, The Sorrow of the Lonely and the Burning of the Dancers
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).
9. Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture: The Nature and Future of Creativity (New York:
Penguin Books, 2004); Lewis Hyde, Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); James Boyle, The Second
Enclosure Movement and the Construction of the Public Domain, Law and
Contemporary Problems 66 (2003): 33.
10. James Carey, Communication as Culture (London: Routledge, 2009), 18.
11. Sinnreich, Mashed Up.
12. Jacques Attali, Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985), 15.
13. Bram Kempers, Painting, Power, and Patronage: The Rise of the Professional
Artist in the Italian Renaissance, trans. Beverley Jackson (London: Penguin, 1995);
Larry Gross, Art and Artists on the Margins, in On the Margins of Art Worlds,
ed. Larry Gross (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).
14. Joel Sachs, London: The Professionalization of Music, in The Early
Romantic Era: Between Revolutions, 1789 and 1848, ed. Alexander Ringer, 20135
(Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991).
15. Christopher Small, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration
in African American Music (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England,
1987), 62, 346.
16. Lyman Ray Patterson, Copyright in Historical Perspective (Nashville:
Vanderbilt University Press, 1968), 5.
17. Ibid., 6.
18. For a thorough examination of the Jefferson-Madison correspondence
and a comprehensive history of American copyright, see Hyde, Common as Air.
19. See, for instance, the US Copyright Offices claim that copyright law
encourages cultural innovation by securing exclusive rights to . . . authors in
Celebrating World Intellectual Property Day 2011, www.copyright.gov/docs
/wipo2011.html.
20. Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society,
Yale Law Journal 106, no. 2 (1996): 283387.
21. Tim Wu, Copyrights Communications Policy, Michigan Law Review
103 (November 2004): 349.
22. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance
Back in Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
23. Although copyright has been advanced as an instrument of several
non-economic ends, such as quality control, a lengthy analysis by the then law
professor and future Supreme Court justice Stephen Breyer concluded that
none of these ends were adequate to justify the means. In his words, if we
are to justify copyright protection, we must turn to its economic objectives.
Stephen Breyer, The Uneasy Case for Copyright: A Study of Copyright in
NOTES TO PAGES 1924
203
Books, Photocopies and Computer Programs, Harvard Law Review 84, no. 2
(December 1970): 291.
24. John Ogasapian, Music of the Colonial and Revolutionary Era (Westport, CT:
Greenwood Press, 2004).
25. Lorenzo Candelaria and Daniel Kingman, American Music: A Panorama
(Boston: Schirmer, 1979).
26. There were copyrighted musical works in the United States prior to this
act; some legal scholarship suggests that the language of the law was expanded
to include music as a statutory clarification of existing norms. See, for instance,
Oren Bracha, Commentary on the U.S. Copyright Act 1831, in Primary Sources
on Copyright (14501900), ed. Lionel Bently and Martin Kretschmer (Cambridge,
UK: Faculty of Law, 2008), www.copyrighthistory.org.
27. Richard Crawford, Americas Musical Life: A History (New York: Norton,
2005), 232.
28. For a more thorough account and analysis of this expansion, see Lessig,
Free Culture; Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University
Press, 2001); and William F. Patry, Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2009).
29. Dena Epstein, Music Publishing in the Age of Piracy: The Board of Music
Trade and Its Catalogue, Notes, 2nd ser., 31, no. 1 (September 1974): 7.
30. Deven R. Desai, The Life and Death of Copyright, Wisconsin Law Review
2011, no. 2 (March 2010): 219.
31. This debate has found new life in the digital era, as evidenced by the
introduction of the Internet Radio Fairness Act into Congress in 2012.
32. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and the Copyright Term
Extension Act (CTEA; also known as the Sonny Bono Act).
33. The 1996 Telecom Deregulation Act.
34. David Bollier, Brand Name Bullies: The Quest to Own and Control Culture
(Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005).
35. Fredric Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music
Business (New York: Random House, 1990); Walter Yetnikoff and David Ritz,
Howling at the Moon: The Odyssey of a Monstrous Music Mogul in an Age of Excess
(New York: Broadway Books, 2004).
36. Theodor Adorno, On Popular Music, in Essays on Music, ed. Richard
Leppert, 43769 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002).
37. Richard Wightman Fox and T. J. Lears Jackson, The Culture of Consumption:
Critical Essays in American History, 18601960 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1983).
38. Bernard W. Carlson, Artifacts and Frames of Meaning: Thomas A.
Edison, His Managers, and the Cultural Construction of Motion Pictures, in
Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies in Sociotechnical Change, ed. Wiebe E.
Bijker and John Law, 175200 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
39. Stuart Ewen, All Consuming Images: The Politics of Style in Contemporary
Culture (New York: Basic Books, 1988); Daniel T. Cook, Consumer Culture,
in The Blackwell Companion to the Sociology of Culture, ed. Mark D. Jacobs and
Nancy Weiss Hanrahan (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 16075.
40. IFPI, Recording Industry in Numbers 2010, www.ifpi.org.
204
NOTES TO PAGES 2430
41. Marcy Rauer Wagman and Paul Rapp, The Band as a Business,
October 4, 2011, Future of Music Coalition, http://futureofmusic.org/article
/article/band-business.
42. Jerry Osborne, ElvisWord for Word: What He Said, Exactly as He Said
It (New York: Random House, 2006); Adrian Grant, Michael Jackson: The Visual
Documentary, new updated millennium ed. (London: Omnibus, 2001).
43. There are exceptions, such as the commercial distribution of religious
music, but these account for a small minority of both music market value and
musical cultural practice.
44. Franchises: Pirates of the Caribbean, Box Office Mojo, http://
boxofficemojo.com/franchises/chart/?id=piratesofthecaribbean.htm.
45. What Is Piracy?, IFPI.com, Views, http://ifpi.org/content/section
_views/what_is_piracy.html.
46. Daniel Heller-Roazen, The Enemy of All: Piracy and the Law of Nations
(New York: Zone Books, 2009).
47. Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1213.
48. Ibid., 32931.
49. Ibid., 44748.
50. Stephen Traiman, Pro & Semi-Pro: All Systems Go, Billboard, May 12,
1979, TAV-3.
51. Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc., 464 U.S. 417 (1984).
52. Mike Hennessey, U.K. Piracy Rate Worlds Lowest, Billboard, June 19,
1982, 9.
53. For an exhaustive examination of the relationship between copyright
and fair use in the context of digital media, see Patricia Aufderheide and
Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back in Copyright (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011).
54. A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (2001).
55. MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005); full disclosure:
I was an expert witness for the defense.
56. Mitch Bainwol, Building a Brighter Future: Making AND Selling Great
Music, address delivered at the National Association of Recording Merchandisers Convention, San Diego, August 12, 2005, available at http://
dreadedmonkeygod.net/home/attachments/Bainwol.pdf; emphasis in
original.
57. Electronic Frontier Foundation, Supreme Court Ruling Will Chill
Technology Innovation, EFF.org, Press Room, June 27, 2005, www.eff.org
/press/archives/2005/06/27-0.
58. Lessig, Free Culture.
2. Riding the Tiger
1. Michael Chanan, Repeated Takes: A Short History of Recording and Its Effects
on Music (London: Verso, 1995).
2. Wiebe E. Bijker and John Law, Shaping Technology/Building Society: Studies
in Sociotechnical Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1992).
NOTES TO PAGES 3038
205
3. Media scholars such as Mark Katz and Jonathan Sterne have written
excellent books detailing the social histories of music recording technologies,
and each has not only informed my thinking on these subjects but also helped
to shape the larger scholarly approach to the topic. It is not my aim here to
reproduce or extend their work, but I feel it is important briefly to revisit some
of the same ground they have covered in the interest of my broader argument.
4. Jonathan Coopersmith, Old Technologies Never Die, They Just Dont
Get Updated, International Journal for the History of Engineering & Technology 80,
no. 2 (July 2010): 16682.
6. Kara Rose, Cassette Tapes See New Life after MP3s, USA Today.com,
October 3, 2011, www.usatoday.com/life/music/news/story/2011-10-02/mp3s
-cassette-tapes-vinyl-albums/50639144/1.
7. Also, because Sony owned its own digital storage format (the Memory
Stick), it chose not to support less expensive and more widely used nonproprietary flash memory cards.
8. Many audiophiles have rejected the claims of CDs perfect quality since
the formats debut, and there are continuing efforts to develop a digital music
ecosystem that allows music to be distributed via the Internet in higher-quality
(24 bit, 96kHz) audio formats.
9. For more in-depth analysis of the social shaping of radio, see Christopher
Sterling and Michael Keith, Sounds of Change: A History of FM Broadcasting in
America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); H. R. Slotten,
Radio Engineers, the Federal Radio Commission, and the Social Shaping of
Broadcast Technology: Creating Radio Paradise, Technology and Culture 36,
no. 4 (1995): 950; Christina Dunbar-Hester, Geeks, Meta-Geeks, and Gender
Trouble: Activism, Identity, and Low-power FM Radio, Social Studies of
Science 38, no. 2 (2008): 20132; Gary Lewis Frost, Early FM Radio: Incremental
Technology in Twentieth-Century America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 2010).
10. Officially Its No Decision; Unofficially AFM Turns Thumbs Down on
FM Feed, Billboard, February 19, 1944, 12.
11. Hugh Richard Slotten, Radio and Television Regulation: Broadcast Technology
in the United States, 19201960 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000),
144.
12. B. Eric Rhoads, Blast from the Past: A Pictorial History of Radios First 75 Years
(West Palm Beach, FL: Streamline Publishing, 1996), 32829.
13. Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2004).
14. July Records, Time, July 14, 1941, 42.
15. Sidney Bechet and Rudi Blesh, Treat It Gentle: An Autobiography (Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press, 2002).
16. Wayne Wadhams, Inside the Hits, ed. David Nathan and Susan Gedutis
Lindsay (Boston: Berklee Press, 2001); James Hunter, Recordings, Rolling
Stone, April 3, 1997, 64; Soundcheck Smackdown: Aja, WNYC.org, April 19,
2011, www.wnyc.org/shows/soundcheck/2011/apr/19/soundcheck
-smackdown-aja/.
206
NOTES TO PAGES 4152
3. Weve Been Talking about This for Years

1. I have never particularly cared for this term, although it does come in handy
at times like these.
2. Steve Jones, Music and the Internet, in The Handbook of Internet Studies,
ed. M. Consalvo and C. Ess, 44051 (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011).
3. C. Krishan Bhatia, Richard C. Gay, and W. Ross Honey, Windows into
the Future: How Lessons from Hollywood Will Shape the Music Industry,
e-Insights, Booz Allen & Hamilton, 2011, www.boozallen.com/media/file
/76799.pdf.
4. Charles C. Mann, The MP3 Revolution, Atlantic Online, April 8, 1999,
www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/digicult/dc990408.htm; Justin
Hughes, On the Logic of Suing Ones Customers and the Dilemma of
Infringement-Based Business Models, Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law
Journal 22, no. 3 (2005): 72576; Tone-Deaf Businessman, Lefsetz Letter,
http://lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2011/12/30/tone-deaf
-businessmen/.
5. Aram Sinnreich, Copyright and Intellectual Property: Creating New
Business Models with Digital Rights Management, Jupiter Research (1999).
6. MP3s Biggest Threat, Maximum PC, September 1999, 44.
7. Seth Mnookin, Universals CEO Once Called iPod Users Thieves. Now
Hes Giving Songs Away, Wired.com, Magazine, vol. 5, no. 12, November
27, 2007, www.wired.com/entertainment/music/magazine/15-12/mf_morris.
8. Ibid.
9. Michael A. Carrier, Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story,
Wisconsin Law Review 2012, no. 4, 891, available at http://ssrn.com/abstract
=2099876.
10. Elisabeth Kbler-Ross, On Death and Dying (London: Routledge, 1969).
11. Other commentators have used this framework as well, including
TEDxRegents ParkDr. Jeremy Silver, Death of a Business Model: How
the Music Industry Is Grieving and Growing, July 30, 2009, available at www
.youtube.com/watch?v=2RA6pAk7n88; and Alison McEmber, The Publishing
Industry, the Recording Industry, and the Five Stages of Grief, Xavier Journal
of Politics 2, no. 1 (2011): 2032. To my knowledge, I was the first to make this
comparison publicly, in presentations I gave as keynote speaker at the Halifax
Pop Music Explosion in 2008 and elsewhere between 2006 and 2010. A copy of
this presentation can be found at www.slideshare.net/originalsinn/opposite
-day-music-in-the-network-age.
12. KAS Immink, The Compact Disc Story, Journal of the Audio Engineering
Society 46, no. 5 (1998): 45865.
13. Steve Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash of the
Record Industry in the Digital Age (New York: Free Press, 2009), 118.
14. John C. Dvorak, Talk about Pop Music, PC Magazine, September 23,
1997, 87.
15. Steven V. Brull, Net Nightmare for the Music Biz, Business Week,
March 2, 1998), 8990.
16. Kbler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 64.
NOTES TO PAGES 5660
207
17. Don Jeffrey, Downloading Songs Subject of RIAA Suit, Billboard, June
21, 1997, 3.
18. Jennifer Urban and Laura Quilter, Efficient Process or Chilling Effects?
Takedown Notices under Section 512 of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act,
Santa Clara Computer & High Technology Law Journal 22, no. 4 (March 2006): 687.
19. Its difficult to establish the exact number, as DMCA takedown notices
are not typically made public.
20. Jon Healy, Online Music Services Besieged, Los Angeles Times, May 28,
2001.
21. 180 F.3d 1072 (9th Cir., 1999).
22. Brooks Boliek, Eisner: Piracy Killer App for Computer Profiteers,
Hollywood Reporter, March 1, 2002.
23. MP3s Biggest Threat, Maximum PC, September 1999, 46.
24. See, for instance, Arista Records, LLC v. Doe 3, 604 F.3d 110 (2010).
25. Prepared Remarks of Hilary Rosen, Chairman and CEO, Hilary Rosen,
Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), National Association of
Recording Merchandisers, Annual Convention and Trade Show, Orlando,
Florida, March 17, 2003, www.riaa.com/newsitem.php?news_year_filter
=&resultpage=54&id=870A2E2F-1415-5740-F001-252D26B52493.
26. Philip E. Meza, Coming Attractions? Hollywood, High Tech, and the Future of
Entertainment (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 130.
27. Eliot Van Buskirk, RIAA Training Video Leaked onto Torrent Sites,
Wired.com, Listening Post, February 19, 2008, www.wired.com/listening
_post/2008/02/riaa-training-v/.
28. Cory Doctorow, Stargate Fan-site Operator Busted under Antiterrorism Law, Boingboing, July 26, 2004, http://boingboing.net/2004/07/26
/stargate-fansite-ope.html.
29. Kbler-Ross, On Death and Dying, 95.
30. Sinnreich, Copyright and Intellectual Property.
31. Aram Sinnreich, Digital Music Subscriptions: Post-Napster Product
Formats, Jupiter Research (2000).
32. Charlie Sorrell, So Long, and Thanks for All the Cash: Yahoo Shuts
Down Music Store and DRM Servers, Wired.com, Gadget Lab, July 25, 2008,
www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2008/07/so-long-and-tha/.
33. Matt Asay, Warner Music: It was wrong to go to war with our customers
[Gasp!], CNET.com, News, November 15, 2007, http://news.cnet.com
/8301-13505_3-9817893-16.html.
34. In inflation-adjusted 2011 dollars.
35. Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor released an EP with Columbia
Records in 2012, a few years after NIN parted ways with Interscope, but thus
far, NIN itself has yet to release any additional recordings via a major label. It is
my (unsubstantiated) opinion that Reznors deal with Columbia was a gesture
of goodwill, to ameliorate his relations with the majors as he negotiated licensing deals for his yet-to-launch digital music subscription service, tentatively
named Daisy.
36. Although Madonnas 2012 album, MDNA, was distributed and marketed
by Interscope, her recording contract is part of a 360 deal with the live events
208
NOTES TO PAGES 6067
company Live Nation, which she signed after leaving a decades-long relationship with Warner Music Group.
37. As I told the Seattle Times when SpiralFrog was announced, I felt it was
really promising that the labels are going to finally stop kvetching and start
thinking intelligently about where their moneys going to come from in the
21st century. Quoted in Charles Duhigg and Dawn C. Chmielwski, All Music
Downloads from Largest Record Seller Will Be Free, Seattle Times, August 30,
2006, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/nationworld/2003234969
_music30.html.
38. Declan McCullagh, Warner Music Readies CD-free e-label, CNET
.com, News, August 22, 2005, http://news.cnet.com/Warner-Music-readies
-CD-free-e-label/2100-1027_3-5841355.html.
39. Geoff Taylor, Napster10 Years of Turmoil, BBC.co.uk, News,
June 26, 2009, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8120320.stm.
40. Erik Pedersen, Has the Music Business Turned a Corner? RIAA Reports
First Revenue Increase in 7 Years, Hollywood Reporter, March 28, 2012. Later
reports showed that this upward trend continued throughout 2012.
41. Eliot Van Buskirk, Copyright Time Bomb Set to Disrupt Music,
Publishing Industries, Wired.com, Business, November 13, 2009, www
.wired.com/epicenter/2009/11/copyright-time-bomb-set-to-disrupt-music
-publishing-industries/.
42. Michael Arrington, 360 Music Deals Become Mandatory as Labels
Prepare for Free Music, TechCrunch, November 8, 2008, http://techcrunch
.com/2008/11/08/360-music-deals-become-mandatory-as-labels-prepare-for
-free-music/.
4. Dissecting the Bogeyman
1. A principle coined by Intel founder Gordon Moore, which holds that the
amount of computer processing power available at a given price will double
every eighteen months.
2. Quoted in Kevin D. Mitnick and William L. Simon, The Art of Intrusion:
The Real Stories behind the Exploits of Hackers, Intruders, and Deceivers (Indianapolis:
Wiley, 2005): 35.
3. Cary H. Sherman, What Wikipedia Wont Tell You, New York Times,
February 8, 2012.
4. For a more in-depth overview of the range of P2P protocols and architectures, see Anura P. Jayasumana, File Sharing to Resource SharingEvolution
of P2P Networking, IEEE Consumer Communications and Networking
Conference (CCNC), Las Vegas, January 2012, available at http://host.comsoc
.org/market/ccnctutorials/T2_Jayasumana_P2P_CCNC2012_2.pdf.
5. A&M Records, Inc. v. Napster, Inc., 239 F.3d 1004 (2001)
6. MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd., 545 U.S. 913 (2005); Arista Records LLC
v. Lime Group LLC, 715 F. Supp. 2d 481 (2010). I served as an expert witness for
the defense in both of these cases.
7. This ruling has been criticized for being overly vague and broad in its
applicability, a subject I explore in greater depth in chapter 8.
NOTES TO PAGES 6775
209
8. Greg Sandoval, RIAA Wants Revived LimeWire Dead and Buried,

CNET.com, News, November 19, 2010, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001
_3-20023365-261.html.
9. Aram Sinnreich, Nathan Graham, and Aaron Trammell, Weaving a New
Net: A Mesh-Based Solution for Democratizing Networked Communications,
Information Society 27, no. 5 (2011): 33645.
10. Sam Laird, The Pirate Bay Plans Robot Drone Servers to Dodge Law
Enforcement, Mashable, March 19, 2012, http://mashable.com/2012/03/19
/the-pirate-bay-drones/; the sincerity of these plans, which would entail a great
deal of engineering difficulty and expense, has been widely challenged.
11. See, for instance, TorrentReactors recent launch of http://come.in, a free
proxy service that enables users to access four censored BitTorrent trackers.
12. United States of America v. Daniel Dove; the decision, entered November 7,
2008, can be viewed at www.vawd.uscourts.gov/OPINIONS/JONES
/207CR15REST.PDF.
13. Defined as users who have visited a music-related site in the last 12
months.
14. We used regression analysis, typically considered a statistical indicator of
causality, and a stronger indicator of meaningful relationship than correlation.
Formats, Jupiter Research (2000).
16. Aram Sinnreich, File-Sharing: To Preserve Music Market Value, Look
Beyond Easy Scapegoats, Jupiter Research (2002).
17. Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, File Sharing and Copyright, NBER [National Bureau of Economic Research] Book Series Innovation
Policy and the Economy, vol. 10, ed. Josh Lerner and Scott Stern (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010), 35.
18. Drew Wilson, What Filesharing Studies Really SayPart 1Litigation
a Failure?, ZeroPaid.com, May 1, 2012, www.zeropaid.com/news/100847
/what-filesharing-studies-really-say-part-1-litigation-a-failure/.
19. Bob Lefsetz, 360 Deals, TheLefsetzLetter, November 11, 2007, http://
lefsetz.com/wordpress/index.php/archives/2007/11/11/360-deals/.
21. Steve Gordon, The Future of the Music Business: How to Succeed with the
New Digital Technologies: A Guide for Artists and Entrepreneurs, 3rd ed. (Milwaukee:
Hal Leonard Books, 2011).
22. Steve Gordon, personal communication.
23. Mike Masnick, Lady Gaga Says No Problem If People Download Her
Music; The Money Is in Touring, Techdirt, May 24, 2010, www.techdirt.com
/articles/20100524/0032549541.shtml.
24. Music Sponsorship Spending to Total $1.17 Billion in 2011, PRWeb,
April 29, 2011, www.prweb.com/releases/2011/04/prweb5278604.htm.
25. Angela Hund-Gschel, Music Sponsorship at a Turning Point (Lohmar,
Germany: Josef Eul Verlag, 2009), 31.
26. See, for instance, Annelies Huygen, Ups and Downs: Economic and
Cultural Effects of File Sharing on Music, Film and Games, TNO Information
and Communication Technology, February 18, 2009, www.ivir.nl/publicaties
210
NOTES TO PAGES 7581
/vaneijk/Ups_And_Downs_authorised_translation.pdf; Bericht des Bundesrates zur unerlaubten Werknutzung ber das Internet, EJPD, November 30,
2011, www.ejpd.admin.ch/content/dam/data/pressemitteilung/2011
/2011-11-30/ber-br-d.pdf; Richard Bjerke, and Anders Srbo, The Norwegian
Music Industry in the Age of Digitalization, masters thesis, BI Norwegian
School of Management (Oslo), 2010; Do Music Artists Fare Better in a World
with Illegal File-Sharing?, Times Online Labs Blog, accessed November 12, 2009,
http://web.archive.org/web/20091214051313/http://labs.timesonline.co.uk
/blog/2009/11/12/do-music-artists-do-better-in-a-world-with-illegal-file
-sharing/; Guatham Nagesh, Report Minimizes Online Piracy Impact, The
Hill, January 30, 2012, http://thehill.com/blogs/hillicon-valley/technology
/207361-report-downplays-impact-of-online-piracy.
27. Michael Masnick and Michael Ho, The Sky Is Rising!, Techdirt, January
2012, www.techdirt.com/skyisrising/.
28. 50 Cent: File-Sharing Doesnt Hurt Artists, Industry Should
Adapt, TorrentFreak, December 8, 2007, http://torrentfreak.
com/50cent-file-sharing-doesnt-hurt-the-artists-071208/.
29. Quoted in Steve McCaskill, Swiss Government Rules Downloading to
Stay Legal, TechWeek Europe, December 5, 2011, www.techweekeurope.co.uk
/news/swiss-government-rules-downloading-to-remain-legal-48351.
30. Terra Firma, Annual Review (2007), 88, www.terrafirma.com/
annual-reviews.html.
31. Shakira Hits Back at Lily Allen in Illegal Downloading Row as She
Claims File-Sharing Brings Me Closer to Fans, Mail Online, October 20, 2009,
www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1221639/Shakira-hits-Lily-Allen
-illegal-downloading-row-claims-file-sharing-brings-closer-fans.html.
32. Aram Sinnreich, Copyright and Intellectual Property: Creating New
Business Models with Digital Rights Management, Jupiter Research (1999).
33. Matt Peiken, MP3// Music at Your Fingertips, St. Paul Pioneer Press
(1999).
34. Free Tom Petty Track Pulled from MP3 Site, but Still Available Online,
MTV News, March 9, 2012, www.mtv.com/news/articles/1433145/free
-tom-petty-track-pulled-from-mp3-site-but-still-available-online.jhtml.
35. David Y. Choi and Arturo Perez, Online Piracy, Innovation, and
Legitimate Business Models, Technovation 27 (2007): 16878.
36. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of
More (New York: Hyperion, 2006).
37. On the history of payola see Fredric Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and
Fast Money Inside the Music Business (New York: Random House, 1990).
38. See, for instance, Ram D. Gopal, Sudip Bhattacharjee, and G. Lawrence
Sanders, Do Artists Benefit from Online Music Sharing?, Journal of Business
79, no. 3 (2006): 150333; Sanjay Goel, Paul Miesing, and Uday Chandra, The
Impact on Peer-to-Peer File Sharing on the Media Industry, California Management Review 52, no. 3 (2010): 633; Magali Dubosson-Torbay, Yves Pigneur,
and Jean-Claude Usunier, Business Models for Music Distribution after the
P2P Revolution, in Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference on the Web
Delivering of Music, WEDELMUSIC 2004 (Washington, DC: IEEE Computer
NOTES TO PAGES 8184
211
Society, 2004), 17279; William Uricchio, Cultural Citizenship in the Age of

P2P Networks, in Media Cultures in a Changing Europe, ed. Ib Bondebjerg and
Peter Golding (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2004), 13964.
39. Eric Lambleau, Collateral Damage: Mutant Sounds Eric Lumbleau,
Wire, November 2011, http://thewire.co.uk/articles/7880/.
40. Patrick Foster, Musicians Hit Out at Plans to Cut Off Internet for
File Sharers, Times (London), September 10, 2009, http://entertainment
.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/music/article6828262.ece.
41. Adrian Johns, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 436.
42. Harry Smith, liner notes to Anthology of American Folk Music, ed. Harry
Smith, Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, originally released 1952, available
at http://media.smithsonianfolkways.org/liner_notes/smithsonian_folkways
/SFW40090.pdf.
43. Harry Smith Bio, Harry Smith Archives, www.harrysmitharchives
.com/1_bio/index.html. Smiths Anthology also received two subsequent
Grammy awards when it was reissued by the Smithsonian in 1997.
44. 715 F. Supp. 2d 481 (2010). The report is a matter of public record, and
is available at www.scribd.com/doc/55319273/Limewire-Sinnreich-Report.
45. Pirate Verbatim, http://verbatimpirate.wordpress.com/.
46. IFPI, Digital Music Report 2012, www.ifpi.org/content/library
/DMR2012.pdf.
47. Katie Dean, Winwood: Roll with P2P, Baby, Wired, July 9, 2004,
www.wired.com/entertainmentlmusic/news/2004/07/64128.
48. Janko Roettgers, Counting Crows: Dont Bribe Radio, Use BitTorrent,
Gigaom, May 14, 2012, http://bit.ly/Je3zHh.
49. Mike Dirnt (Green Day) Interview, TheEnd107.7.com, May 15, 2009,
www.1077theend.com/Mike-Dirnt--Green-Day--Interview/11611264?pid
=214039.
50. Heart Crazy on TrustyFiles P2P File Sharing Network Distribution,
RazorPop, July 19, 2004, www.trustyfiles.com/corp-press-heart.php.
51. Jeff Leeds, Nine Inch Nails Fashions Innovative Web Pricing Plan,
New York Times, March 4, 2008.
52. Trent Reznor Sells 2500 Ultra-Deluxe Vinyl NIN Ghosts at $300 Each in
a Day, Synthesis, March 5, 2008, http://synthesis.net/trent-reznor-sells-2500
-ultra-deluxe-vinyl-nin-ghosts-at-300-each-in-a-day/.
53. Eliot Van Buskirk, Nine Inch Nails Album Generated $1.6 Million in
First Week (Updated), Wired Listening Post, March 13, 2008, www.wired.com
/listening_post/2008/03/nine-inch-nai-2/.
54. Eric Steuer, Nine Inch Nails The Slip Out under a Creative Commons
License, May 5, 2008, http://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/8267.
55. August Brown, Radioheads Publishing Company Reveals the Take
from In Rainbows, Pop & Hiss (blog), Los Angeles Times, October 15, 2008,
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/music_blog/2008/10/radioheads-publ.html.
56. Radiohead CD Tops UK Album Chart, BBC News, January 6, 2008,
http://news.bbc.co.ukJ2/hi/entertainmentl7173993.stm; Jonathan Cohen,
Radiohead Nudges Blige From Atop Album Chart, Billboard, January 9, 2008,
212
NOTES TO PAGES 8486
www.billboard.com/articles/news/1046867/radiohead-nudges-blige-from
-atop-album-chart.
57. Kyle Anderson, Prince Says Internet Is Over, But Radiohead,
Trent Reznor, and Others Beg to Differ, MTV Newsroom, July 7, 2010, http://
newsroom.mtv.com/2010/07/07/prince-internet-is-over/.
58. Greg Kot, Ripped: How the Wired Generation Revolutionized Music (New
York: Scribner, 2009), 64.
59. Andre Paine, Prince to Release 20Ten for Free in Europe, Billboard,
June 29, 2010, www.billboard.com/articles/news/957575/prince-to-release
-20ten-for-free-in-europe.
60. What Is a Sufjan?, Bandcamp: the blog, August 24, 2010, http://blog
.bandcamp.com/2010/08/24/what-is-a-sufjan/.
61. Amanda Palmer: The New Record, Art Book, and Tour, Kickstarter,
launched April 30, 2012, www.kickstarter.com/projects/amandapalmer
/amanda-palmer-the-new-record-art-book-and-tour.
62. Amanda Palmer, Where All This Kickstarter Money Is Going, May 22,
2012, www.amandapalmer.net/blog/where-all-this-kickstarter-money-is-going
-by-amanda/.
63. Amanda Palmer @ Harvard: Toward a Patronage Society, July 8, 2010,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3lJQjihCp1E.
64. Data from Kickstarter, www.kickstarter.com/help/stats.
65. Ethan Diamond, Cheaper Than Free, Bandcamp: the blog, January 3,
2012, http://blog.bandcamp.com/2012/01/03/cheaper-than-free//.
66. Jan Hoffman, Justin Bieber Is Living the Dream, New York Times,
December 31, 2009.
67. The Top 10 Viral Videos of 2010, Spike, December 22, 2010, www
.spike.com/articles/kkpro9/the-top-10-viral-videos-of-2010.
68. Eliot Van Buskirk, Gregory Brothers of Bed Intruder Fame Discuss
TV Pilot, Antoine Dodson, Wired, August 13, 2010, www.wired.com/
epicenter/2010/08/gregory-brothers-bed-intruder-antoine-dodson-autotune.
69. Mike Thomas, Really Hot, for Real, Chicago Sun Times, November 29,
2010.
70. Alex Leavitt, May 12, 2012, https://twitter.com/alexleavitt/status
/201440625684529152.
71. According to the RIAAs searchable database of gold and platinum
certified releases, available at www.riaa.com/goldandplatinumdata.php.
72. Universal Censors Megaupload Song, Gets Branded a Rogue Label,
TorrentFreak, December 10, 2011, http://torrentfreak.com/universal-censors
-megaupload-song-gets-branded-a-rogue-label-111210/.
73. UMG later claimed it took down the video using YouTubes Content
Management System (created in order to comply with the DMCA) without
specifically claiming any infringement under the DMCAwhich is actually
worse. For more details, see Bruce Houghton, Megaupload Video Back on
YouTube, after UMG Offers We Yanked It Because We Could Defense,
Hypebot, December 16, 2011, www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2011/12
/megaupload-video-back-on-youtube-after-umg-offers-we-yanked-it-because
-we-could-defense-.html.
NOTES TO PAGES 8690
213
74. Kim Dotcom, Megaupload Song HD, YouTube, www.youtube.com

/watch?v=o0Wvn-9BXVc.
75. US Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, Justice Department
Charges Leaders of Megaupload with Widespread Online Copyright Infringement,
January 19, 2012, www.justice.gov/opa/pr/2012/January/12-crm-074.html.
76. Juha Saarinen, Megauploads Kim Dotcom Granted Bail, Barred from
Internet, Ars Technica, February 21, 2012, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy
/2012/02/megauploads-kim-dotcom-granted-bail-barred-from-internet/.
The conditions of Dotcoms bail echo the courts judgment against infamous
hacker Kevin Mitnick, who even after his release from jail was prohibited from
touching computers. Of course, the difference is that Dotcom has not yet
been convicted of a crime. For more in-depth analysis of the social dynamics
surrounding Mitnicks sentencing, see Douglas Thomas, Hacker Culture
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002).
77. Record Labels Invest US$4.5 Billion in New Music, IFPI, November
12, 2012, www.ifpi.org/content/section_news/investing_in_music.html.
78. International Recording Industry Welcomes New French Law to
Protect Artists and Creators, IFPI, April 3, 2009, www.ifpi.org/content/section
_news/20090403.html.
79. Future of Music Coalition, Major Label Contract Clause Critique,
October 3, 2001, http://futureofmusic.org/article/article/major-label-contract
-clause-critique.
80. Steve Albini, The Problem with Music, in Commodify Your Dissent:
Salvos from The Baffler, ed. Thomas Frank and Matt Weiland (New York:
Norton, 1993).
81. Donald Passman, All You Need to Know about the Music Business (New York:
Free Press, 2009).
82. Cord Jefferson, The Music Industrys Funny Money, The Root, July 6,
2010, www.theroot.com/views/how-much-do-you-musicians-really-make.
83. Paul Resnikoff, A Major Label Artist Makes 8 Cents on a 99-Cent iTunes
Download . . . , Digital Music News, November 3, 2011, www.digitalmusicnews
.com/permalink/2011/111103labelpays.
84. The Cost of a CD (undated), RIAA, http://web.archive.org/web
/20000901073253/http://riaa.org/MD-US-7.cfm.
85. Eriq Gardner, Village Peoples Victor Willis Wins Huge Rights Reversion
Case over YMCA, Billboard, May 8, 2012.
86. 621 F.3d 958.
87. Antony Bruno, Supreme Court Rejects Universal Music Groups Appeal
of Eminem Royalty Case, Billboard, March 21, 2011.
88. Eriq Gardner, Apple Doesnt Want Musicians to See Secret Steve Jobs
Deposition, Hollywood Reporter, April 30, 2012, www.hollywoodreporter.com
/thr-esq/apple-steve-jobs-deposition-universal-music-317999.
5. Bubbles and Storms
1. Cary H. Sherman, What Wikipedia Wont Tell You, New York Times,
February 7, 2012.
214
NOTES TO PAGES 9094
2. IFPI, Digital Music Report 2012, p. 16, www.ifpi.org.

3. Record Label Exec: Radio Is Paramount to Breaking Artists, Keeping
Superstars Relevant, NAB.org (National Association of Broadcasting), August
25, 2009, www.nab.org/documents/newsroom/pressRelease.asp?id=2075.
4. Leibowitzs File Sharing: Creative Destruction or Just Plain Destruction,
for example, is cited in Piracy Impact Studies, RIAA.com, Music Industry
Research, www.riaa.com/keystatistics.php?content_selector=research-report
-journal-academic; Cary H. Sherman, Comments, Questions, Concerns: RIAA
CEO Reflects on Responses to His New York Times Op-Ed, Music Notes Blog,
RIAA.com, February 23, 2012, www.riaa.com/blog.php?content_selector
=riaa-news-blog&blog_selector=RIAA-CEO-Reflects-&news_month_filter
=2&news_year_filter=2012.
5. Stan Liebowitz, The Metric Is the Message: How Much of the Decline
in Sound Recording Sales Is Due to File-Sharing?, November 2011, (emphasis
added), available at http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id
=1932518. Professor Liebowitz was retained as an expert witness on behalf of
the plaintiffs in Arista v. Lime Group, and submitted a report rebutting my own
expert testimony in the case.
6. Eriq Gardner, How the Recording Industry Intends to Win Billions from
LimeWire, Hollywood Reporter, April 6, 2011, www.hollywoodreporter.com
/thr-esq/how-recording-industry-intends-win-175739.
7. Although Liebowitzs expert report in Arista v. Lime Group is subject to a
court-imposed confidentiality order and therefore cant be publicly cited, his report in Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum is available at the Harvard Law School website,
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/~nesson/Liebowitz%20Expert%20Report.pdf.
8. Richard Arnold Johnson, and Gouri Bhattacharyya, Statistics: Principles
and Methods (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley & Sons, 2010), 108.
9. For instance, see the IFPIs explanation of revised figures in Richard
Smirke, IFPI 2012 Report: Global Music Revenue Down 3%; Sync, PRO,
Digital Income Up, Billboard, March 26, 2012, www.billboard.biz/bbbiz
/industry/global/ifpi-2012-report-global-music-revenue-down-1006571352.
story.
10. Sacha Wunsch-Vincent and Graham Vickery, Working Party on the Information Economy: Digital Broadband Content: Music, December 13, 2005, prepared
for Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, available at
www.oecd.org/internet/ieconomy/34995041.pdf.
14. Ultimately, the industry acknowledges in its publications that even its own
conversion rates from trade to retail revenues are estimates, so the aim here is
directionality and consistency, rather that definitive accuracy.
15. Earl Paige, Dealers, Manufacturers in Upbeat CD Discussion, Billboard,
October 6, 1984, 22.
16. Whats Working? Whats Not?, Billboard, April 18, 1998, 45; Don Jeffrey
and Brian Garrity, For Brick and Mortar Retail, Biz Is Solid but Buzz Is Silent,
Billboard, December 4, 1999, 137.
NOTES TO PAGES 94100
215
17. Irv Lichtman, Cohen Studies Industry Future, Billboard, December 19,
1981, 48.
18. Ed Christman, Best Buy, Circuit City a Potent Combo, Billboard,
June 17, 1995, 80.
19. Ed Christman, Worsening Retail Conditions Finally Arrive at Labels
Door, Billboard, February 10, 1996, 58.
20. Fredric Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money Inside the Music
Business (New York: Random House, 1990).
21. Jerkins is better known for his work in the R&B/pop idiom than with
boy bands per se.
22. RIAA, Top 100 Albums, RIAA.com, Top Tallies, www.riaa.com
/goldandplatinum.php?content_selector=top-100-albums; this is a measure of
the US market only.
23. Hunter Schwarz, Lady Gaga Joins the Seven Figure Club, Rhombus,
June 3, 2011, www.rhombusmag.com/2011/06/03/lady-gaga-joins-the-seven
-figure-club/. It should be noted that prior to 1991, the recording industry used
different methodologies to establish sales volume; therefore this method of
analysis is somewhat biased toward recent releases. Nonetheless, it is broadly
accepted that this era was a golden age of quick market successes for the music
industry.
24. National Bureau of Economic Research, US Business Cycle Expansions
and Contractions, September 20, 2010, www.nber.org/cycles.html.
25. US Census Bureau Income, Expenditures, Poverty, and Wealth,
2012 Statistical Abstract, www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/income
_expenditures_poverty_wealth.html.
26. United Nations, Creative Economy Report 2008, http://unctad.org/en
/docs/ditc20082cer_en.pdf.
27. Sherman, What Wikipedia Wont Tell You.
28. Terra Firmas Annual Review 2008, TerraFirma.com, www.terrafirma
.com/annual-reviews.html.
29. Although most popular music didnt take quite so long as the Beatles
to appear in DRM-free downloadable formats, some major artists, such as Led
Zeppelin, AC/DC, and Garth Brooks, remained absent from iTunes digital
shelves for even longer.
30. Warner Music Group, Annual Report (Form 10-K), November 17, 2010;
Warner Music Group, Annual Report (Form 10-K), December 1, 2006.
31. Quoted in Charles Duhigg, Getting Warner Music More Upbeat,
Los Angeles Times, August 28, 2006, http://articles.latimes.com/2006/aug/28
/business/fi-lyor28.
32. Chris Anderson, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of
More (New York: Hyperion, 2006). Andersons premise is that because digital
commerce provides an infinite amount of shelf space and digital broadcasting
provides an infinite amount of air time, there are significant opportunities to derive profit from the work of less popular artists and producers than those who have
traditionally been exploited in the of bricks-and-mortar and broadcasting sectors.
33. Quoted in Steve Knopper, Appetite for Self-Destruction: The Spectacular Crash
of the Record Industry in the Digital Age (Berkeley: Soft Skull Press, 2009), 181.
216
34. Anita Elberse, Bye-Bye Bundles: The Unbundling of Music in Digital

Channels, Journal of Marketing 74, no. 3 (May 2010): 181.
35. David Lieberman, States Settle CD Price-Fixing Case, USA Today,
September 30, 2002.
36. Bill Marsh, A History of Home Values, New York Times, August 26, 2006.
37. Ed Christman, NARM Coverage: New Laws Threaten Used CD Market,
Billboard, May 1, 2007, www.billboard.com/biz/articles/news/retail/1324116/
narm-coverage-new-laws-threaten-used-cd-market.
38. Michael Masnick and Michael Ho, The Sky Is Rising!, Techdirt, www
.techdirt.com/skyisrising/.
39. Anderson, Long Tail, 23.
40. Statement of Tim Westergren, Chief Strategy Officer and founder of
Pandora, before the Subcommittee on Communications and the Internet,
Committee on Energy and Commerce, U.S. House of Representatives, on
The Future of Audio, June 6, 2012.
41. About CD Baby, www.cdbaby.com/About.
42. Ben Sisario, Out to Share Up Music, Often with Sharp Words, New York
Times, May 7, 2012.
43. Warner Music Group acknowledged this in public filings between 2006
and 2010, citing growing competition for consumer discretionary spending
and retail shelf space as a contributor to a declining recorded music industry;
the filings are available at http://investors.wmg.com.
44. IFPI, Global Music Retail Sales, including Digital, Flat in 2004, IFPI.org,
Market Research Publications Shop, March 22, 2005, www/ifpi.org/content
/section_news/20050322.html.
45. IFPI, Music Piracy Report, June 2002, www.ifpi.org/content/library
/Piracy2002.pdf.
46. CD Bootlegging Soars, CBSNews, February 18, 2009, www.cbsnews
.com/2100-207_162-530296.html. Its important to take these, and all piracy
figures reported by the recording industry, with a grain of salt, as I discuss later
in this chapter.
47. Facts About IP, TheTrueCosts.org, http://web.archive.org/web
/20090422052629/http://www.thetruecosts.org/index.php/resources/
facts-a-stats.
48. Report Sheds Light on Scale and Complexity of Online Piracy and
Counterfeiting Problem, MarkMonitor.com, Press Releases, January 11, 2011
(emphasis added), https://www.markmonitor.com/pressreleases/2011
/pr110111.php.
49. Frontier Economics, Estimating the Global Economic and Social Impacts
of Counterfeiting and Piracy, report commissioned by Business Action to Stop
Counterfeiting and Piracy (BASCAP), February 2011, available at www.iccwbo
.org/uploadedFiles/BASCAP/Pages/Global%20Impacts%20-%20Final.pdf.
50. Emphasis added.
51. www.theglobalipcenter.com/facts.
52. Stephen E. Siwek, The True Cost of Sound Recording Piracy to the U.S. Economy,
policy report for Institute for Policy Innovation, October 3, 2007, www.ipi.org
/ipi_issues/detail/the-true-cost-of-copyright-industry-piracy-to-the-us-economy.
217
53. www.ei.com/viewprofessional.php?id=41.
54. Sherman, What Wikipedia Wont Tell You.
55. According to its website (www.iipa.com), the IIPA is a a private sector
coalition, formed in 1984, of trade associations representing U.S. copyrightbased industries. The RIAA and NMPA are two of the seven members.
56. Stephen E. Siwek, Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy: The 20032007
Report, prepared for the International Intellectual Property Alliance, June 2009,
www.iipa.com/pdf/IIPASiwekReport2003-07.pdf.
57. Who Music Theft Hurts, RIAA.com, Piracy, www.riaa.com
/physicalpiracy.php?content_selector=piracy_details_online.
58. Julian Sanchez, 750,000 Lost Jobs? The Dodgy Digits Behind the War
on Piracy, Ars Technica (blog), October 8, 2008, http://arstechnica.com/tech
-policy/2008/10/dodgy-digits-behind-the-war-on-piracy/.
59. I discuss SOPA in greater depth in chapter 8.
60. US Government Accountability Office, Intellectual Property: Observations
on Effort to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods, Report to
Congressional Committees, April 2010, www.gao.gov/new.items/d10423.pdf.
61. www.riaa.com/faq.php.
62. Frontier Economics, Estimating the Global Economic and Social Impacts
of Counterfeiting and Piracy.
63. US Government Accountability Office, Intellectual Property, 19.
64. Stephen E. Siwek, Copyright Industries in the U.S. Economy: The 2011 Report,
prepared for the International Intellectual Property Alliance, November, 2011,
www.iipa.com/copyright_us_economy.html.
65. Janko Roettgers, Sorry, Hollywood: Piracy May Make a Comeback,
GigaOM, August 11, 2011, http://gigaom.com/video/file-sharing-is-back/.
6. Is the Music Industry Its Own Worst Enemy?
1. Quoted in Lawrence Robert Dicksee and Frank Tillyard, Goodwill and Its
Treatment in Accounts (New York: Arno Press, 1976), 2.
2. John Owen Edward Clark, Dictionary of International Accounting Terms
(Canterbury, UK: Financial World, 2001).
3. Michael Sack Elmaleh, Financial Accounting: A Mercifully Brief Introduction
(Union Bridge, MD: Epiphany Communications, 2005), 91.
4. William M. Krasilovsky and Sidney Shemel, This Business of Music: The
Definitive Guide to the Business and Legal Issues of the Music Industry (New York:
Watson-Guptill Publications, 2007), 317.
5. Echo Research, The Value of Corporate Reputation: 2012 US Reputation
Dividend Report, June 2012, www.echoresearch.com/data/File/2012_reputation
_dividend_report.pdf.
6. Jared Moya, The Pirate Bay Spectrial Day #11Prosecutions Closing
Arguments, ZeroPaid.com, News, March 2, 2009, www.zeropaid.com/news
/10037/the_pirate_bay_spectrial_day_11__prosecutions_closing_arguments/.
7. RIAA Wins Worst Company in America 2007, Consumerist, March 19,
2007, http://consumerist.com/2007/03/riaa-wins-worst-company-in-america
-2007.html.
218
8. Theodor Adorno, On Popular Music, Studies in Philosophy and Social

Science 9, no. 1 (1941).
9. Marc Fisher, Something in the Air: Radio, Rock, and the Revolution That Shaped
a Generation (New York: Random House, 2007).
10. US House of Representatives Judiciary Committee, List of Supporters:
H.R. 3261, Stop Online Piracy Act, available at http://images.politico.com/global
/2011/12/76259944-sopa-supporters.pdf.
11. The complaint in Rogers v. Capitol Records, LLC is available online at
www.digitalmusicnews.com/legal/kennyrogersvcapitolrecords.pdf.
12. Terrestrial radio in the United States is not required to pay a royalty to
record labels, but this is not the case in many other countries.
13. Michael Geist, Canadian Recording Industry Faces $6 Billion
Copyright Infringement Lawsuit, Michael Geists Blog, December 7, 2009,
www.michaelgeist.ca/content/view/4596/135/; the suit was eventually
settled in 2011 for $45 million.
14. See, for example, Norman Kelley, Notes on the Political Economy of
Black Music, in R&B, Rhythm and Business: The Political Economy of Black Music,
ed. Norman Kelley, 623 (New York: Akashic Books, 2002).
15. Eric Klinenberg, Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control Americas Media
(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).
16. Fredric Dannen, Hit Men: Power Brokers and Fast Money inside the Music
Business (New York: Random House, 1990).
17. Dean Budnick and Josh Baron, Ticket Masters: The Rise of the Concert Industry
and How the Public Got Scalped (Toronto: ECW Press, 2011).
18. Jack Banks, Music Video Cartel: A Survey of Anti-competitive Practices
by MTV and Major Record Companies, Popular Music & Society 20, no. 2
(1996): 17396.
19. Patrick Burkart and Tom McCourt, Digital Music Wars: Ownership and
Control of the Celestial Jukebox (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006).
20. Geoffrey Hull, The Recording Industry (New York: Psychology Press,
2004).
21. Steve Lukather, A View from Both Sides of the Fence: Steve Lukather
on Whats Right and Whats Wrong with the Music Business, in How to Make
It in the New Music Business, ed. Robert Wolff (New York: Billboard Books,
2004), 6374.
22. This was before the merger of BMG and Sony Music.
23. Matt Richtel, U.S. Inquiry Is Under Way on Online Music Business,
New York Times, October 16, 2001.
24. Sony Music Entertainment v. Kevin Starr, 131 S.Ct. 901 (2011).
25. Paul Verna, Vital Reissues, Billboard, May 4, 1996, 42.
26. FTC Hits Clubs Sales Practice, Billboard, May 30, 1970, 86.
27. Budnick and Baron, Ticket Masters.
28. Quoted in Michael A. Carrier, Copyright and Innovation: The Untold
Story, Wisconsin Law Review 2012, no. 4, 908, available at http://ssrn.com
/abstract=2099876.
29. IFPI Online Music Report 2004, www.ifpi.org/content/library/digital
-music-report-2004.pdf.
219
30. Jane Black, The Keys to Ending Music Piracy, Bloomberg Businessweek,
January 26, 2003, www.businessweek.com/stories/2003-01-26/the-keys-to
-ending-music-piracy.
31. IFPI Online Music Report 2004.
32. MP3s Biggest Threat, Maximum PC, September 1999.
33. John Borland, RIAA Sues 261 File Swappers, CNET News, August 8, 2003,
http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023_3-5072564.html.
34. Felix Oberholzer-Gee and Koleman Strumpf, File Sharing and Copyright,
in National Bureau of Economic Research Innovation Policy and the Economy, vol. 10,
ed. Josh Lerner and Scott Stern (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).
35. Paul Lauria, Infringement! Artists Say They Want Their Music Site
Dough, New York Post, February 27, 2008, http://www.nypost.com/p/news
/business/item_glszDqoJCb8e6qBvDjeHTL.
36. The most extensive chronicle, to my knowledge, is Recording Industry
vs The People, the blog of Ray Beckerman, an attorney who specializes in
defending those sued by the music industry, available at http://
recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com.
37. John Borland, RIAA Settles with 12-year-old Girl, CNET News,
August 9, 2003, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1027-5073717.html.
38. Andrew Orlowski, RIAA Sues the Dead, The Register, February 5, 2005,
www.theregister.co.uk/2005/02/05/riaa_sues_the_dead/.
39. Ray Beckerman, RIAA Wants to Depose Dead Defendants Children;
But Will Allow Them 60 Days to Grieve, Recording Industry vs The People,
August 13, 2006, http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2006/08
/riaa-wants-to-depose-dead-defendants.html.
40. Anders Bykund, RIAA Sues Computer-less Family, 234 Others, for File
Sharing, Ars Technica (blog), April 24, 2006, http://arstechnica.com
/uncategorized/2006/04/6662-2/.
41. Jessica R. Towhey, Naval Academy Seizes Computers from Nearly 100
Mids, The Capital Online, November 23, 2002, http://web.archive.org/web
/20021125141336/http://www.hometownannapolis.com/cgi-bin/read/live
/11_23-19/NAV.
42. Cassi Hunt, Run Over by the RIAA: Don . . . t Tap the Glass, Cassi Hunt,
The Tech Online Edition, April 4, 2006, http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N15/RIAA1506
.html.
43. Electronic Frontier Foundation, RIAA v. The People: Five Years Later,
September 30, 2008, https://www.eff.org/wp/riaa-v-people-five-years-later.
44. Ray Beckerman, RIAA Sues Stroke Victim in Michigan, Recording
Industry vs. The People, March 13, 2007, http://recordingindustryvspeople
.blogspot.com/2007/03/riaa-sues-stroke-victim-in-michigan.html.
45. Ray Beckerman, Elektra v. Schwartz, Case against Queens Woman with
Multiple Sclerosis, Settled, Recording Industry vs. The People, August 13, 2008,
http://recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/08/elektra-v-schwartz
-case-against-queens.html.
46. Ray Beckerman, Voluntary Dismissals Because Suit Was Brought
against Wrong Party, Recording Industry vs. The People, May 24, 2008, http://
220
recordingindustryvspeople.blogspot.com/2008/05/voluntary-dismissals
-because-suit-was.html.
47. As I mentioned in chapter 3, the industry largely ceased to bring
lawsuits against P2P users in 2008.
48. Daniel Reynolds, The RIAA Litigation War on File Sharing and
Alternatives More Compatible with Public Morality, Minnesota Journal of
Law, Science & Technology 9 no. 2 (2008): 9771008.
49. Chloe Lake, Major Label Pressures Anti-piracy Groups, News.com.au,
January 22, 2008, www.news.com.au/technology/major-label-pressures-anti
-piracy-groups/story-e6frfro0-1111115372785.
50. Eric Bangeman, RIAA Anti-P2P Campaign a Real Money Pit, According
to Testimony, Ars Technica (blog), October 3, 2007, http://arstechnica.com
/tech-policy/2007/10/music-industry-exec-p2p-litigation-is-a-money-pit/.
51. Declan McCullagh, Newsmaker: RIAAs Next Moves in Washington,
CNET.com, News, May 25, 2006, http://news.cnet.com/2008-1027
_3-6076669.html.
52. Ellen Messmer, Recording Industry Gives Net Music Pirates a Break,
Network World (1997): 95.
53. The Motion Picture Association of America is a trade organization
representing the six major Hollywood studios.
54. Quoted in Declan McCullagh, Hollywood Hacking Bill Hits House,
CNET News, July 25, 2002, http://news.cnet.com/2100-1023-946316.html.
55. The Computer and Communications Industry Association is an
advocacy group promoting openness and competition in technology and
communications, with several large companies in both sectors comprising its
membership.
56. McCullagh, Hollywood Hacking Bill Hits House.
57. Hal Plotkin, Berman-Coble Goes Too Far / Legalizing Hacking of P2P
Networks Hurts Start-ups, Not Thieves, SFGate, May 21, 2013, www.sfgate
.com/news/article/Berman-Coble-Goes-Too-Far-Legalizing-hacking-of2798931.php.
58. Mark Russinovich, Sony, Rootkits, and Digital Rights Management
Gone Too Far, Mark Russinovichs Blog, October 31, 2005, http://blogs.technet
.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2005/10/31/sony-rootkits-and-digital-rights
-management-gone-too-far.aspx.
59. Full disclosure: I served as an expert witness for the plaintiffs in one of
the suits.
60. J. Alex Halderman, Not Again! Uninstaller for Other Sony DRM Also
Opens Huge Security Hole, Freedom to Tinker (blog), November 17, 2005,
https://freedom-to-tinker.com/blog/jhalderm/not-again-uninstaller-iotheri
-sony-drm-also-opens-huge-security-hole/.
61. Jolie ODell, Once This Hits 4chan, Its Over: RIAA/MPAA Privacy/
Security Failure, ReadWriteWeb, May 14, 2009, http://readwrite.com/2009/05/14
/once_this_hits_4chan_its_over_riaampaa_privacysecu.
62. Ernesto Van Der Sar, RIAA and Homeland Security Caught Downloading Torrents, TorrentFreak, December 17, 2011, http://torrentfreak.com/riaa
-and-homeland-security-caught-downloading-torrents-111217/.
221
63. Ernesto Van Der Sar, Busted: BitTorrent Pirates at Sony, Universal,
and Fox, TorrentFreak, December 13, 2011, https://torrentfreak.com
/busted-bittorrent-pirates-at-sony-universal-and-fox-111213/.
64. www.bumastemra.nl/en/about-bumastemra/organisation/.
65. Most details of the Rietveldt case are from Ernesto Van Der Sar,
Copyright Corruption Scandal Surrounds Anti-piracy Campaign, TorrentFreak,
December 1, 2011, http://torrentfreak.com/copyright-corruption-scandal
-surrounds-anti-piracy-campaign-111201/.
66. A Google search for the phrase RIAA pick on the little guy yields
36,000 results.
67. An industry interviewee told Michael Carrier that the scorched-earth
litigation strategy had threatened the magic around music perceived by
consumers (Copyright and Innovation, 59). Given Walter Benjamins famous
rumination on the fate of aura in the age of mechanical reproduction, one
wonders whether this is, indeed, a tragedy.
68. Survey: Half of People Think Not Paying for Music Is Acceptable,
MusicWeek, July 13, 2012, www.musicweek.com/news/read/survey-half-of
-people-think-not-paying-for-music-is-acceptable/049573.
7. This Sounds Way Too Good
1. Pandora was involved, however, in prolonged arbitration regarding the
webcasting royalty rates, which was followed by additional contractual negotiation with the digital performing rights organization SoundExchange.
2. According to the companys most recent public filings at the time of
writing.
Formats (Jupiter Research, 2000).
4. Peter Kafka, Spotifys Daniel Ek on Profits, Label Deals, and Angry
Musicians: Were Doing Really, Really Well AllThingsD.com, December 6,
2012, http://allthingsd.com/20121206/spotifys-daniel-ek-on-profits-label-deals
-and-angry-musicians-were-doing-really-really-well/.
5. Jeff Dyer, Hal B. Gregersen, and Clayton M. Christensen, The Innovators
DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators (Boston: Harvard Business
Press, 2011).
6. Steve Blank, Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That
Win, 2nd ed. (Foster City, CA: Cafepress.com, 2006).
7. Steve Blank, Why the Movie Industry Cant Innovate and the Result Is
SOPA, SteveBlank.com, January 4, 2012, http://steveblank.com/2012/01/04
/why-the-movie-industry-cant-innovate-and-the-result-is-sopa/.
8. Michael A. Carrier, Copyright and Innovation: The Untold Story,
Wisconsin Law Review 2012, no. 4, 959, 958, available at http://ssrn.com
/abstract=2099876.
9. These stories are based on my interviews with principals of the companies. I personally interviewed and/or advised many of the multitude of these
businesses in my capacity as a digital music analyst and consultant at Jupiter
Research and Radar Research.
222
10. Jeremy Silver, Skype interview, July 20, 2012; all quotations are from this
interview.
11. Uplister licensed these clips, at a relatively low cost, from the aggregator
All Music Guide.
12. Justin Ouellette, telephone interview July 18, 2012; all quotations are
from this interview.
13. The original Tumblr post is available at Muxtape, http://jstn.cc/post
/29796928.
14. Not long before our interview, Tumblr had been sued by Perfect 10,
an adult entertainment company, for enabling widespread and uncontrolled
copyright infringement.
15. David Pakman, telephone interview, July 18, 2012; all quotations are from
this interview.
16. Remote data storage and maintenance, now the cloud, was then a
nascent idea more frequently referred to as the sky.
17. As I previously discussed, fair use is a poorly defined concept that often
must be defended in court, at great expense, in order to be exercised in new
technological and social contexts. This uncertainty can have what legal scholars
call a chilling effect on innovation. For a thorough analysis of the subject, see
Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi, Reclaiming Fair Use: How to Put Balance Back
in Copyright (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
18. Bertelsmann eCommerce Group had purchased Pakmans former
employer CDnow the previous year and also made a bid for Napster (which
had been bankrupted by major label lawsuits) in 2002.
19. Billboards Twitter 140: The Music Industry Characters You Need to
Follow, Billboard, July 27, 2012, www.billboard.biz/bbbiz/record-labels/2012
-twitter-140-1007674952.story.
20. Michael Robertson, telephone interview, July 23, 2012; all quotations are
from this interview.
21. UMG Recordings, Inc. v. MP3.com, Inc., 92 F. Supp. 2d 349 (S.D.N.Y. 2000).
22. The full text of Judge Rakoffs decision is available at www.law.uh.edu
/faculty/cjoyce/copyright/release10/UGM.html.
23. Despite having launched several high-profile companies in the years
since, Robertsons Twitter handle is @MP3Michaela nod to his continuing
public association with the company he founded, and lost, many years ago.
24. All details and quotations in this section are from my telephone interview
with Jack Foreman, former Warner Music SVP and Choruss principal, July 19,
2012.
25. Larry Kenswil, telephone interview, July 25, 2012; all quotations are from
this interview.
26. Greg Sandoval, Last Waltz for Playlist.com?, CNET, News, August 24,
2010, http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20014495-261.html.
27. Jon Pareles, The Cloud That Ate Your Music, New York Times, June 22,
2011.
28. Apple reportedly paid an advance of over $100 million to the labels, in
addition to a pledge of 70 percent of revenues from the service, which charges
consumers $25 per year.
223
8. Guilty until Proven Innocent

1. The Cybersecurity Act of 2012: Protecting Americas Economy from
Threats and Theft, Democratic Policy and Communications Center, July 26,
2012, www.dpcc.senate.gov/?p=issue&id=186.
2. Nate Anderson, Anti-Piracy Vid Is Reefer Madness for the Digital Age,
Ars Technica (blog), December 1, 2011, www.wired.com/threatlevel/2011/12
/reefer-madness/.
3. Grant Gross, File Trading May Fund Terrorism, InfoWorld.com,
News, March 13, 2003, www.infoworld.com/t/networking/file-trading
-may-fund-terrorism-766.
4. Paul Resnikoff, Hillary Clinton Says Anti-Piracy & Internet Freedoms
Are Mutually Consistent . . . , Digital Music News, November 4, 2011, www
.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2011/111104clinton.
5. Freedom of Speech, RIAA, http://riaa.com/aboutus.php?content
_selector=Freedom-Of-Speech.
6. Searchable via tools made available at http://sunlightfoundation.com.
7. Ben Dimiero, How Much Did Media Companies Spend Lobbying
on SOPA and PIPA?, MediaMatters.org, Blog, February 3, 2012, http://
mediamatters.org/blog/2012/02/03/how-much-did-media-companies
-spend-lobbying-on/.
8. Metadata is a term used to describe the information contained in a file
such as a Microsoft Word document, including data such as its most recent
author and the date it was edited.
9. Xeni Jardin, P2P in the Legal Crosshairs, Wired.com, Entertainment,
March 15, 2004, www.wired.com/entertainment/music/news/2004/03/62665.
10. Schmitt quoted in Derek Thompson, Googles CEO: The Laws Are
Written by Lobbyists Atlantic, October 1, 2010, www.theatlantic.com
/technology/archive/2010/10/googles-ceo-the-laws-are-written-by-lobbyists
/63908/.
11. Michael Cieply, Expect Some Toning Down of Antipiracy Bills, Says
Movie Industry Supporter, Media Decoder (blog), New York Times, November 30,
2011, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/30/expect-some
-toning-down-of-antipiracy-bills-says-movie-industry-supporter/.
12. Maira Sutton, Internet Users Again Shut Out of Secret TPP Negotiation,
Deeplinks (blog), Electronics Frontier Foundation, July 2, 2012, https://www.eff
.org/deeplinks/2012/07/internet-users-again-shut-out-secret-tpp-negotiations.
13. Romulus Appoints International Policy Leaders Chris Moore and
Victoria Espinel to Global Issues Management Team, undated press release,
PRNewswire, www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/romulus-appoints
-international-policy-leaders-chris-moore-and-victoria-espinel-to-global-issues
-management-team-58567747.html.
14. The copyright scholar and self-described centrist William Patry has
argued that the term graduated response should be replaced with the more
accurate term digital guillotine. William F. Patry, Moral Panics and the
Copyright Wars (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), 14.
224
15. David Kravets, Copyright Czar Cozied Up to Content Industry, E-mails

Show, Wired.com, Threat Level, October 14, 2011, www.wired.com
/threatlevel/2011/10/copyright-czar-cozies-up/.
16. Alexander Furnas, Why an International Trade Agreement Could Be as
Bad as SOPA, Atlantic, February 6, 2012, www.theatlantic.com/technology
/archive/2012/02/why-an-international-trade-agreement-could-be-as-bad
-as-sopa/252552/.
17. For a more nuanced discussion of this dilemma, see Jonah Bossewitch
and Aram Sinnreich, The End of Forgetting: Strategic Agency beyond the
Panopticon, New Media & Society 15, no. 2 (July 2012): 22442.
18. Because of the multifaceted and evolving nature of the anti-piracy
agenda, many of these concrete details will already have changed by the time
the book is in print. Yet it is unlikely that the overarching agenda will have
changed much at all.
19. Michael Geist currently blogs at www.michaelgeist.ca/.
20. Until 2010, William Patry blogged at http://williampatry.blogspot.com/.
21. Cory Doctorow blogs at http://boingboing.net and has a regular column
in the Guardian, www.guardian.co.uk/profile/corydoctorow.
22. Karl Fogel currently blogs at http://questioncopyright.org.
23. The Electronic Frontier Foundation Deeplinks blog is available at www
.eff.org/deeplinks/.
24. The Public Knowledge blog is available at www.publicknowledge.org
/blog.
25. Robert J. Gutowski, The Marriage of Intellectual Property and International Trade in the TRIPs Agreement: Strange Bedfellows or a Match Made in
Heaven?, Buffalo Law Review 47 (1999): 713.
26. Damias A. Wilson, Copyrights Compilation Conundrum: Modernizing
Statutory Damage Awards for the Digital Music Marketplace, St. Johns Law
Review 85 (2011): 11891220.
27. Alan Schwarz, At 92, a Bandit to Hollywood but a Hero to Soldiers,
New York Times, April 27, 2012.
28. This concept is not explicitly outlined in legislation and exists primarily
through case law.
29. For a more in-depth discussion of ISP secondary liability, see Emerald
Smith, Lord of the Files: International Secondary Liability for Internet Service
Providers, Washington and Lee Law Review 68 (2011): 1555.
30. The text of the bill, including the struck paragraphs, is available at www
.govtrack.us/congress/bills/111/s3804/text.
31. 2011 U.S. Intellectual Property Enforcement Coordinator Annual Report on
Intellectual Property Enforcement, March 2012, www.whitehouse.gov/sites
/default/files/omb/IPEC/ipec_annual_report_mar2012.pdf.
32. The newly elected French government has declared the law a failure
and plans to de-fund the agencys activities. Cyrus Farivar, French Anti-P2P
Agency Hadopi Likely to Get Shut Down, Ars Technica (blog), August 3, 2012,
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/08/french-anti-p2p-agency-hadopi
-likely-to-get-shut-down/.
225
33. The bill stalled in the Senate in August 2012, after a Republican filibuster.
34. European Observatory on Counterfeiting and Piracy, Evidence and Right
of Information in Intellectual Property Rights, http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market
/iprenforcement/docs/evidence_en.pdf.
35. Somini Sengupta, U.N. Affirms Internet Freedom as a Basic Right, Bits
(blog), New York Times, July 6, 2012, http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/06
/so-the-united-nations-affirms-internet-freedom-as-a-basic-right-now-what/.
36. The original document is no longer available online, but an extensive
analysis of its contents is Richard Esguerra, The Entertainment Industrys
Dystopia of the Future, April 14, 2010, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks
/2010/04/entertainment-industrys-dystopia-future.
37. Gigi Sohn, Before SOPA and PIPA: A Decade of Bad Ideas, paper
presented at The Digital Broadband Migration: The Challenges of Internet Law
and Governance conference, February 1213, 2012, University of Colorado.
38. Tony Chavira, ACTA: A Government-Approved International Conspiracy, FourStory.org, Blog, January 31, 2012, http://fourstory.org/posts
/post/acta-a-true-american-conspiracy/.
39. Nate Anderson, Senator: Web Censorship Bill A Bunker-Busting
Cluster Bomb Ars Technica (blog), November 20, 2010, www.wired.com
/business/2010/11/senator-web-censorship-bill-a-bunker-busting-cluster
-bomb/.
40. Macon Philips, Administration Responds to We the People Petitions
on SOPA and Online Piracy, The White House Blog, January 14, 2012, www
.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/01/14/obama-administration-responds-we-people
-petitions-sopa-and-online-piracy.
41. HM Government, The Government Response to the Hargreaves Review
of Intellectual Property and Growth, report by Rt. Hon. George Osborne, MP,
Rt. Hon. Vince Cable, MP, and Rt. Hon. Jeremy Hunt, MP, August 2011,
www.ipo.gov.uk/ipresponse-full.pdf.
42. Dana Smith, What Warners Recklessness Says about SOPA, Public
Knowledge Policy Blog, November 11, 2011, www.publicknowledge.org/blog
/what-warners-recklessness-says-about-sopa.
43. Mike Masnick, Fox Issues DMCA Takedown to Google over SF
Chronicle Article . . . Claiming It Was the Movie Chronicle Techdirt, May 29,
2012, www.techdirt.com/articles/20120525/01520819073/fox-issues-dmca
-takedown-to-google-over-sf-chronicle-article-claiming-it-was-movie-chronicle
.shtml.
44. Ben Sisario, How a Music Site Disappeared for a Year, Media Decoder
(blog), New York Times, December 9, 2011, http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes
.com/2011/12/09/how-a-music-site-disappeared-for-a-year/.
45. Jonathan McIntosh, Buffy vs Edward Remix Unfairly Removed by Lionsgate, Rebellious Pixels.com, Blog, January 9, 2013, www.rebelliouspixels.com
/2013/buffy-vs-edward-remix-unfairly-removed-by-lionsgate.
46. Office of the United States Trade Representative, Partners Sign Groundbreaking Anti-counterfeiting Trade Agreement, press release, October 2011,
www.ustr.gov/about-us/press-office/press-releases/2011/october/partners
-sign-groundbreaking-anti-counterfeiting-t.
226
47. IFPI, Digital Music Report 2012, www.ifpi.org.

49. Maira Sutton, Spains Ley Sinde: New Revelations of U.S. Coercion,
Deeplinks (blog), Electronic Frontier Foundation, January 9, 2012, https://www
.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/01/spains-ley-sinde-new-revelations.
50. enigmax, US Threatened to Blacklist Spain for Not Implementing Site
Blocking Law, January 5, 2012, TorrentFreak, http://torrentfreak.com/us
-threatened-to-blacklist-spain-for-not-implementing-site-blocking-law-120105/.
51. Rick Falkvinge, Cable Reveals Extent of Lapdoggery from Swedish
Govt on Copyright Monopoly, Falkvinge & co. on Infopolicy (blog), September
5, 2011, http://falkvinge.net/2011/09/05/cable-reveals-extent-of-lapdoggery
-from-swedish-govt-on-copyright-monopoly/.
52. Michael F. Brown, Can Culture Be Copyrighted?, Current Anthropology
39, no. 2 (1998): 193222.
53. Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite, Information Feudalism: Who Owns the
Knowledge Economy? (London: Earthscan Publications, 2002), 179.
54. Joe Karaganis and Sean Flynn, Networked Governance and the USTR,
in Media Piracy in Emerging Economies, Report of Social Science Research
Council, 2011, http://piracy.ssrc.org.
55. Jagdish N. Bhagwati, In Defense of Globalization (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004).
56. Michael Heller, The Gridlock Economy: How Too Much Ownership Wrecks
Markets, Stops Innovation, and Costs Lives (New York: Basic Books, 2008).
57. Madeleine Bunting, The Profits That Kill, Guardian, February 13, 2001.
58. Jeremy Kirk, Malware Demands Payment for Alleged Copyright
Infringement, PCWorld.com, News, May 6, 2012, www.pcworld.com
/businesscenter/article/255108/malware_demands_payment_for_alleged
_copyright_infringement.html.
59. My June 9, 2011, blog post is available at http://aramsinnreich.typepad
.com/aram_squalls/2011/06/phishers-use-dmca-takedowns-notices-as-malware
-links.html.
60. Ernesto Van Der Sar, 200,000 BitTorrent Users Sued in the United States,
TorrentFreak, August 8, 2011, http://torrentfreak.com/200000-bittorrent-users
-sued-in-the-united-states-110808/.
61. Gerard N. Magliocca, Blackberries and Barnyards: Patent Trolls and
the Perils of Innovation, Notre Dame Law Review 82 (2006): 1809.
62. Anna B. Folgers, The Seventh Circuits Approach to Deterring the
Trademark Troll: Say Goodbye to Your Registration and Pay the Costs of
Litigation, Seventh Circuit Review 3, no. 1 (2007): 45290.
63. James Bessen, Michael J. Meurer, and Jennifer Ford, The Private and
Social Costs of Patent Trolls, Boston University School of Law, Law and
Economics Research Paper No. 11-45, September 19, 2011, 26.
64. Sarah McBride, US Patent Lawsuits Now Dominated by Trolls
Study, December 10, 2012, available at www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/10
/patents-usa-lawsuits-idUSL1E8NA55M20121210.
65. Peter Bradwell, Gemma Craggs, Alessandra Cappuccini, and Joana
Kamenova, Mobile Internet Censorship: Whats Happening and What We Can Do
227
About It, online report published by Open Rights Group and LSE Media Policy
Project, May 2012, www.openrightsgroup.org/assets/files/pdfs/MobileCensorship
-webwl.pdf.
66. James Love, USPTO Blocks Web Access to Political/Activist Groups
Including KEI, ACLU, EFF, Public Citizen, Redstate, DailyKos, James Loves
blog, Knowledge Ecology International, September 18, 2012, http://keionline
.org/node/1548.
67. How Copyright Law Censors Campaigns, Daniel Nazer, Stanford Law
School Center for Internet and Society Blog, July 19, 2012, http://cyberlaw.stanford
.edu/blog/2012/07/how-copyright-law-censors-campaigns.
68. Ryan Singel, YouTube Flags Democrats Convention Video on Copyright
Ground, Wired.com, Threat Level, September 5, 2012, www.wired.com
/threatlevel/2012/09/youtube-flags-democrats-convention-video-oncopyright-grounds/.
69. Rebecca Giblin, How Litigation Only Spurred on P2P File Sharing, iTnews
.com.au, Telco/ISP News & Opinions, November 11, 2011, www.itnews.com.au
/News/279763,how-litigation-only-spurred-on-p2p-file-sharing.aspx.
70. Paul Resnikoff, Report: The MegaUpload Shutdown Hasnt Reduced
File-Trading at All . . . , Digital Music News, February 10, 2012, www
.digitalmusicnews.com/permalink/2012/021012postmegaupload.
71. Nic Healy, Pirates Who Pay: Do Illegal Downloads Actually Help the
Box Office?, CNET Australia, Home Cinema: News, November 26, 2012,
www.cnet.com.au/pirates-who-pay-do-illegal-downloads-actually-help-the
-box-office-339342557.htm.
72. Olivia Solon, French Culture Minister Thinks Hadopi Is a Waste of
Money, Wired.co.uk, News, August 8, 2012, www.wired.co.uk/news
/archive/2012-08/08/hadopi-funding.
73. Raphael Satter and Venessa Gera, US Sites Hacked as Objections Grow
to Piracy Deal, NBC News.com, February 17, 2012, www.msnbc.msn.com/id
/46427642/ns/technology_and_science-security.
74. Matt Warman, European Parliament Rejects ACTA Piracy Treaty, The
Telegraph, July 4, 2012, www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/news/9375822
/European-Parliament-rejects-ACTA-piracy-treaty.html.
9. Is Democracy Piracy?
1. The wedding video is available on YouTube at www.youtube.com/watch?v
=yYAiZ-L4gXg.
2. Kopimist Constitution, Kopimistsamfundet.org, www.kopimistsamfundet
.org/main/kopimist-constitution.
3. Lawrence Lessig, Code: And Other Laws of Cyberspace, Version 2.0 (New York:
Basic Books, 2006).
4. Det Missionerande Kopimistsamfundet, Welcome to the Missionary
Church of Kopimism, http://kopimistsamfundet.se/english/.
5. The Monastery of Christ in the Desert website, A Brief History of
Scriptoria and the Evolution of the Book, http://christdesert.org/Seeking
_God/Scriptoria/index.html.
228
6. Ibid.
7. There are, of course, strategic risks to sacralizing aspects of communication policy. As William Patry has pointed out, the piracy crusade bears many
of the hallmarks of a classic moral panic, and thus Kopimism runs the risk of
reducing the copyfight to a moral argument between irreconcilable dogmas
rather than maintaining a rational, ends-oriented policy debate.
8. The PPI website is available at www.pp-international.net/.
9. Can Pirates Shake Up European Politics?, Aljazeera.com, The Stream,
April 9, 2012, http://stream.aljazeera.com/story/can-pirates-shake-european
-politics-0022165.
10. Adam Taylor, German Pirate Party: Were Growing as Fast as the Nazis
Did, Business Insider International, April 23, 2012, www.businessinsider.com
/pirate-party-nazi-martin-delius-spiegel-2012-4.
11. Pirate Party UK, Greater London Pirate Party Agenda, www.pirateparty
.org.uk/forum/viewtopic.php?f=28&p=8699.
12. Jared Moya, Euro Anti-Piracy Group Calls Pirate Party Message
Criminal, ZeroPaid.com, News July 24, 2009, www.zeropaid.com
/news/86705/euro-anti-piracy-group-calls-pirate-party-message-criminal/.
13. Jessica Litman, Real Copyright Reform, Iowa Law Review 96, no. 1 (2010):
156.
14. Stephen Evans, Germanys Pirate Party Riding High, BBC News, May 11,
2012, www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-18017064.
15. James Madison, Federalist no. 43, in The Federalist Papers: Hamilton,
Madison, Jay, ed. Clinton Rossiter (New York: Mentor, 1961), 272.
16. Neil Weinstock Netanel, Copyright and a Democratic Civil Society,
Yale Law Journal 106, no. 2 (1996): 386
17. Thomas Jefferson to Isaac McPherson, August 13, 1813, available at
http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/a1_8_8s12.html.
18. U.S. Const. art. I, 8, cl. 8.
19. Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, 558 U.S. 50 (2010)
20. For a hilarious and instructive meditation on this subject, see Kembrew
McLeod, Freedom of Expression: Overzealous Copyright Bozos and Other Enemies of
Creativity (New York: Doubleday, 2005).
21. Mark Helprin, Digital Barbarism: A Writers Manifesto (New York:
HarperCollins, 2009).
22. Cory Doctorow, Why I Copyfight, Locus Magazine, November 2008,
www.locusmag.com/Features/2008/11/cory-doctorow-why-i-copyfight.html.
23. Eric S. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open
Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Sebastopol, CA: OReilly, 1999).
24. Siva Vaidhyanathan, Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How It Threatens Creativity (New York: New York University Press, 2001).
25. James Boyle, The Second Enclosure Movement and the Construction of
the Public Domain, Law and Contemporary Problems 66, no. 1 (2003): 3374.
26. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected
World (New York: Vintage, 2002).
27. Jessica Litman, The Public Domain, Emory Law Journal 39 (Fall 1990):
965.
229
28. Tim Wu, Copyrights Communications Policy, Michigan Law Review 103
(November 2004): 278.
29. Tim OReilly, Piracy Is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts
on the Evolution of Online Distribution, OpenP2P.com, December 11, 2002,
http://openp2p.com/lpt/a/3015.
30. Cory Doctorow, Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright
and the Future of the Future (San Francisco: Tachyon, 2008).
31. Rip! A Remix Manifesto, dir. Brett Gaylor, initial release 2008, National Film
Board of Canada.
32. Copyright Criminals, dir. Benjamin Franzen and Kembrew McLeod, initial
release (Canada) 2009, www.copyrightcriminals.com/.
33. Good Copy Bad Copy, dir. Andreas Johnsen, Ralf Christensen, and Henrik
Moltke, initial release (Denmark) 2007.
34. Aram Sinnreich, Mark Latonero, and Marissa Gluck, Ethics Reconfigured:
How Todays Media Consumers Evaluate the Role of Creative Reappropriation,
Information, Communication & Society 12, no. 8 (2009): 124260.
35. Mark Latonero and Aram Sinnreich, The Hidden Demography of New
Media Ethics, Information, Communication & Society (forthcoming 2013).
36. The American Assembly, Columbia University, Copyright Infringement and Enforcement in the US, research by Joe Karaganis, November 2011,
http://piracy.ssrc.org/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/AA-Research-Not
e-Infringement-and-Enforcement-November-2011.pdf.
37. Ron Grossman, Where Left Meets Right: Outsiders? Theyve Always
Been In, Chicago Tribune, March 7, 2010, http://articles.chicagotribune.com
/2010-03-07/news/ct-perspec-0307-movements-20100307_1_tea-party-huey
-long-fdr.
38. Hayley Tsukayama, SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) Lawmaker Opposition Grows as Debate Heats Up, Post Tech (blog), Washington Post, November
17, 2011, www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-tech/post/lawmaker
-opposition-to-sopa-grows/2011/11/17/gIQAeCEMVN_blog.html.
39. According to publicly available campaign finance data searchable at
http://influenceexplorer.com/.
40. For more information, see Tim Jordan and Paul Taylor, Hacktivism and
Cyberwars: Rebels with a Cause? (London: Routledge, 2004).
41. Ramona Emerson, SOPA: Anonymous to Protest Anti-piracy Bill on
January 18, Huffington Post, January 12, 2012, www.huffingtonpost.com/2012
/01/12/sopa-anonymous-january-18_n_1201397.html.
42. Ernesto Van Der Sar, Artists and Hacktivists Sabotage Spanish Antipiracy Law, TorrentFreak, March 1, 2012, http://torrentfreak.com/arists-and
-hacktivists-sabotage-spanish-anti-piracy-law-120301/.
43. Hacktivist Group Anonymous Lead Anti-piracy Protests after Claiming
New Agreement Will Violate Consumer Rights and Censor the Internet,
Mail Online, updated January 27, 2012, www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article
-2092990/Hacktivist-group-Anonymous-lead-anti-piracy-protests-claiming-new
-agreement-violate-consumer-rights-censor-internet.html.
44. For an in-depth examination of the political role of Anonymous, see
E. Gabriella Coleman, Anonymous: From the Lulz to Collective Action, The
230
New Everyday: A Media Commons Project, April 6, 2011, http://mediacommons

.futureofthebook.org/tne/pieces/anonymous-lulz-collective-action.
45. Among other places, this motto can be found on the AnonymousPress
Twitter profile: https://twitter.com/AnonymousPress.
46. Todd Gitlin, The Whole World Is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and
Unmaking of the New Left (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).
47. Hackers Hit Polish Government Websites, Marcin Sobczyk, Wall Street
Journal, Emerging Europe Blog, last modified January 23, 2012, http://blogs.wsj
.com/emergingeurope/2012/01/23/hackers-hit-polish-government-websites/.
48. Polish Lawmakers Don Guy Fawkes Masks to Protest ACTA, Rik
Myslewski, The Register, accessed February 6, 2013, www.theregister.co.uk
/2012/01/27/acta_protests_in_poland/.
49. As I discussed in the first chapter, this is hardly a given; one could
just as easily interpret the reduction of creative work to the category of labor
as the commodification of the human spirit, and the naturalization of capitalist
ideology. However, for the present purposes, let us assume that this is a goal
legitimately sought by a great many creative individuals.
50. Jennifer Peltz, Beastie Boys Rappers Will Bars Ad Use of His Work,
Seattle Times, August 10, 2012, http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html
/entertainment/2018890994_apuspeopleadamyauch.html.
51. Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar.
52. Information about the terms of the GPL can be found at www.gnu.org
/licenses/gpl.html.
53. Sam Williams, Free as in Freedom (2.0): Richard Stallman and the Free Software
Revolution (Boston: Free Software Foundation, 2010).
54. Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected
World (New York: Vintage, 2002).
55. Information about the terms of CC licenses can be found at http://
creativecommons.org/licenses/.
56. The Piracy Crusade has been published under a Creative Commons 3.0
Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike license, which means that anyone
can access, edit, and/or redistribute it, as long as they (a) give me credit as the
author, (b) dont make any money from their use of it, and (c) make it available
to third parties according to these same terms.
57. Marieke van Schijndel and Joost Smiers, Imagining a World without
Copyright: The Market and Temporary Protection, a Better Alternative for
Artists and the Public Domain, in Copyright and Other Fairy Tales: Hans Christian
Andersen and the Commodification of Creativity, ed. Helle Porsdam (Northampton,
MA: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2006), 14764.
58. Brad Hall, US Pirate Party, Questions Concerning Copyright, in No Safe
Harbor: Essays about Pirate Politics, http://nosafeharbor.com.
59. James Downie, What Is the Pirate PartyAnd Why Is It Helping
Wikileaks?, Avast Network (blog), New Republic, January 24, 2011, www.tnr
.com/article/world/81963/pirate-party-wikileaks.
60. Congressman Issa has published the Digital Citizens Bill of Rights and
the text of the OPEN Act at http://keepthewebopen.com. At the time of writing, OPEN has been referred to committee in both the House and the Senate.
231
61. The Final Debate (editorial), New York Times, October 23, 2012.
62. Timothy Lee, Influential GOP Group Releases, Pulls Shockingly
Sensible Copyright Memo, Ars Technica (blog), November 18, 2012, http://
arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2012/11/influential-gop-group-releases-shockingly
-sensible-copyright-memo/.
63. Texts of both the brief and the memo are archived on the American Conservative website at www.theamericanconservative.com/an-anti-ip-turn-for-the-gop/.
64. Timothy Lee, Republican Staffer Fired for Copyright Memo Talks to
Ars, Ars Technica (blog), January 7, 2013, http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy
/2013/01/republican-staffer-fired-for-copyright-memo-talks-to-ars/.
65. Data are publicly available and searchable with tools created by the
Sunlight Foundation at http://influenceexplorer.com.
66. Richard Hooper, CBE, UK Intellectual Property Office, Rights and
Wrongs, The First Report of the Digital Copyright Exchange Feasibility Study,
March 2012, www.ipo.gov.uk/dce-report-phase1.pdf; Richard Hooper, CBE,
and Dr. Ros Lynch, Copyright Works, independent report for Intellectual
Property Office, July 2012, www.ipo.gov.uk/dce-report-phase2.pdf.
67. Andreas Udo de Haes, BREIN Dreigt TPB-proxy Met Strafrechtelijke
Aangifte, Web Wereld, June 28, 2012, http://webwereld.nl/nieuws/110976
/brein-dreigt-tpb-proxy-met-strafrechtelijke-aangifte.html.
68. Mark Hachman, Piracy Pays for Itself, Swiss Government Says,
PC Magazine, December 2, 2011, www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2397173,00
.asp.
69. Pedro Nicoletti Mizukami, Ronaldo Lemos, Bruno Magrani, Pereira de
Souza, and Carlos Affonso, Exceptions and Limitations to Copyright in Brazil:
A Call for Reform. Access to Knowledge in Brazil: New Research on Intellectual
Property, Innovation, and Development (2010): 4178.
70. Pedro Paranagu, Brazils Copyright Reform: Schizophrenia?,
Intellectual Property Watch, February 8, 2011, www.ip-watch.org/2011/02/08
/inside-views-brazils-copyright-reform-schizophrenia.
71. Michael Geist, Brazils Approach on Anti-circumvention: Penalties for
Hindering Fair Dealing, Michael Geists Blog, July 9, 2010, www.michaelgeist
.ca/content/view/5180/125/.
72. Marcel Leonardi, Brazils Proposed Internet RegulationAn Update
(Thats Actually Good News) (Guest Blog Post), Eric Goldman Technology
& Marketing Law Blog, May 6, 2010, http://blog.ericgoldman.org/archives
/2010/05/brazils_propose.htm.
73. Everything Is Connected: Can Internet Activism Turn into a Real Political
Movement?, Economist, January 5, 2013.
74. Q&A: Patents in India and the Novartis Case, Doctors Without Borders
.org, Briefing Documents, February 14, 2012, www.doctorswithoutborders.org
/publications/article.cfm?id=5769.
75. Copyright Law of the United States of America, www.copyright.gov
/title17/92chap1.html.
76. I make this argument fully cognizant of Benjamin Kaplans admonition
of over forty years ago that it is almost obligatory for a speaker to begin by
invoking the communications revolution of our time, then to pronounce upon
232
the inadequacies of the present copyright act. Benjamin Kaplan, An Unhurried

View of Copyright (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967).
77. Aram Sinnreich and Marissa Gluck, Music and Fashion: The Balancing
Act between Creativity and Control, paper presented at Ready to Share:
Fashion and the Ownership of Creativity conference, USC Annenberg Norman
Lear Centertainment, January 5, 2005, 4769; Kal Raustiala and Christopher
Springman, The Knockoff Economy: How Imitation Sparks Innovation (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2012).
78. Andrew W. Torrance, DNA Copyright, Valparaiso University Law Review
46, no. 1 (2011): 141.
79. Adam Liptak, Supreme Court to Look at a Gene Issue, New York Times,
December 1, 2012.
80. Nicholas Negroponte, Being Digital (New York: Knopf, 1995).
81. Prior to the Copyright Act of 1976, works had to be registered before
they were protected. As Lessig and others have observed, this shift effectively
privatized the vast majority of the public sphere, which had hitherto belonged
to the public domain.
82. John Tehranian, Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/
Norm Gap, Utah Law Review (2007): 537.
83. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology
(New York: Penguin, 2005).
233
INDEX
Adele, 53
Adorno, Antoniotto, 23
Adorno, Theodor, 121
advertising, 27, 61, 67, 101, 189; radio and,
46, 48
aesthetics, 5053, 103, 107; in music, 2122
Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of
Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), 166,
194
Ahmad II ibn-Muhammad, 2
AIDS-HIV, 194
Albini, Steve, 91
albums, 124; unbundling of, 1089, 138,
14041
All Delighted People (Stevens), 87
Allen, Lily, 85
Allen, Woody, 48
All You Need to Know about the Music Business
(Passman), 91
Amazon, 108, 110, 112, 158
Amazon Web Services, 145
American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 176
American Federation of Musicians (AFM),
47, 51
American Idol, 50
A&M Records v. Napster, Inc., 3435
Anderson, Chris, 112, 216n32
Anonymous (hacker collective), 187
Anthology of American Folk Music (Smith),
8485
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement
(ACTA), 167, 171; negotiated in secrecy,
163, 184; opposition to, 16465, 177,
18688; surveillance and control powers
under, 16869
anti-piracy agenda, 68, 16471, 200;
economic self-interest as driver of, 36,
18687; extension of penalties, 26, 16668,
196; government support of, 161, 18587,
200; impact on civil liberties of, 1213,
16061, 164, 16971, 17677, 187; impact
on international relations of, 1213, 160,

171, 173; opposition to, 171, 17778,
18588, 19495; secondary liability, 167;
stronger copyright laws, 26, 114, 166, 170,
191; surveillance, 68, 114, 160, 16869, 198.
See also piracy crusade
anti-piracy narrative: digital music blamed, 4,
11, 36, 54, 69, 72, 7677, 91, 9396, 113; on
lost sales, 11, 7677, 9496, 11314
AOL, 148
Appetite for Self-Destruction (Knopper), 5859
Apple, 65, 111; cloud service offered by, 67,
158, 223n28; iPod of, 44, 61, 64
Arista v. Lime Group, 95
Armey, Dick, 115
Armstrong, Edwin, 47
Ars Technica, 192
artists and musicians: exploitative practices
against, 12223; and peer-to-peer file
sharing, 8182, 8593; record industry
relationship with, 25, 67, 9192, 103,
12223; royalties received by, 80, 9192,
102, 112
Attali, Jacques, 21
Auto-Tune, 52
Auto-Tune the News, 52, 8889
Backstreet Boys, 1034, 107
Baffler, The, 91
Bainwol, Mitch, 35, 62
Bandcamp.com, 8788, 112
BayTSP, 132, 172
Beam-it, 150, 158
Bechet, Sidney, 51
Becker, Walter, 52
Beckerman, Ray, 130, 220n36
Benjamin, Walter, 222n67
Berman, Howard, 16061; Berman bill, 170,
172
Bertelsmann eCommerce Group, 148, 223n18
Best Buy, 101, 110
235
Bhagwati, Jagdish, 174

Bieber, Justin, 8889
BigChampagne, 83
Billboard magazine, 33, 4748, 100, 111
biotechnology, 197
BitTorrent, 7475, 132, 175
Black, Rebecca, 53
Blank, Steve, 139
Blige, Mary J., 53
Bono, 85
boy bands, 103
Boyle, James, 184
Braithwaite, John, 174
Brazil, 19394
Breyer, Stephen, 203n23
British Phonographic Industry (BPI), 34
Bronfman, Edgar, Jr., 65, 67; and Choruss,
15254
Brown, Michael F., 174
Buffy vs. Edward: Twilight Remixed, 172
Buma/Stemra, 13233
Bunting, Madeleine, 174
Bush, George W., 168
BusinessWeek, 59, 126
Camelot Records, 100
campaign contributions, 16163, 187, 19293
Camplejohn, Doug, 14648, 150
Canada-EU Trade Agreement (CETA), 163,
16869, 173
capitalism, 19, 21, 30, 174, 181, 189, 195
Capitol Records, 122
Carey, James, 20
Carr, Benjamin, 24
Carrier, Michael, 57, 126, 139, 222n67
cassettes, 33, 52, 106; and format replacement
cycle, 27, 4142, 44, 46, 58, 100
Cato Institute, 176
CD Baby, 112
CDs, 44, 113; commercial success of, 42, 58,
99100; and format replacement cycle, 43,
4546, 100, 1067; MAP pricing schemes
for, 1012, 109; MP3.com and, 150;
ripping and burning technologies for,
45, 58, 106; users shift away from, 59, 106
censorship, 68, 114, 172, 176, 198; copyright
as vehicle for, 23; by ISPs, 164, 167, 169
Changizi, Mark, 19
Cher, 52
Chien, Colleen, 176
Choruss, 15155
Christensen, Clayton M., 139
236
INDEX
Christensen, Ralf, 185

Christie, Agatha, 69
Chuck D, 91
Cicero, 3132, 36
Circuit City, 101
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission,
184
civil liberties, 1213, 16061, 164, 16971,
177, 187
Clear Channel, 103, 125
Clinton, Bill, 92
Clinton, Hillary Rodham, 16061
Cloonan, Martin, 10
cloud music services, 45, 67, 155, 158; MP3.
com and, 14951; MyPlay and, 14749
Cobain, Kurt, 30
Cohen, Lyor, 107
Cohen, Ted, 57
Combating Online Infringement and
Counterfeits Act (COICA), 16769, 171,
186
Combs, Sean P. Diddy, 90
Computer and Communications Industry
Association (CCIA), 131, 221n55
computerized music analysis, 5354
Constitution, US, 23, 183
Consumer Broadband and Digital Television
Promotion Act (CBDTPA), 172
Consumerist, The, 120
consumers: behavior and psychology of,
1056, 111; and consumer culture, 2930;
digitizations benefits to, 65, 106, 124, 125,
14041; music industry lawsuits against,
6162, 67, 12730
Coopersmith, Jonathan, 41
copyfight, 18488, 229n7
copying, 5, 13, 177, 185, 195, 198; Kopimism
and, 17981
copyright, 10, 13, 27, 44, 160, 196;
Creative Commons license and, 190;
and democracy, 18283; in digital age,
19699; DMCA law and, 5, 34, 16667,
172, 176, 190, 191; DRM and protection
of, 63; economic justifications for, 24,
189, 203n23; false claims of, 9091, 172,
192, 213n73; functions and purpose of, 23,
189; General Public License and, 18990;
inducement to infringement of, 75,
167; maximalist approach to, 19394,
19698; and music, 2526, 204n26; of
musical scores, 25, 204n26; music industry
focus on, 10, 2526, 28, 36, 65, 114, 126;
opposition to, 183, 185, 187; origins and

evolution of, 2226, 181, 19596; penalties
for infringement of, 26, 16667, 196;
and piracy, 3233; and political party
dynamics, 18587, 192; and takedown
notices, 60, 90, 167, 172, 194, 208n19,
213n73; term length of, 26, 166, 191; and
term reversion, 67, 92; US czar of, 164,
168, 170; and work-for-hire, 92
Copyright Act (1976), 31, 67
Copyright Alert System (CAS), 16465, 169,
171
Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA),
204n32
copyright trolls, 175
Counting Crows, 85
Crawford, Richard, 25
Creation and Internet Law (HADOPI,
France), 16869, 177, 225n32
Creative Commons (CC), 185; licenses, 9,
85, 190, 193, 231n56
creative expression, 30, 166, 18384, 190,
197, 199
critical information studies (CIS), 8
Crosby, Bing, 50
Crow, Sheryl, 92
culture: consumer, 2930; copyrighting and
propertization of, 24, 190, 193, 200; file
sharing benefits to, 7273, 8285
Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act
(CISPA), 168, 172, 18586
Cybersecurity Act, 170, 186
Cyrus, Miley, 53
Dajaz1.com, 172
democracy, 6, 136, 164, 18284
Department of Homeland Security, 168, 170,
172
deregulation, 27, 103
Diamond Multimedia, 57, 61
digital bill of rights, 192, 194, 200
digital distribution, 11, 5859, 66
Digital Economy Act (UK), 169
digital fidelity, 52
Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA),
5, 19091; censorship under, 172, 176;
copy protection bypass criminalized
by, 34, 166; on secondary liability, 167;
takedown notices under, 60, 172, 194,
208n19, 213n73
digital rights management (DRM), 6265,
166, 170, 194
digital subscriptions, 45
digital technology, 7, 35, 58, 120; music
industry and, 17, 1067, 133, 13839
Doctorow, Cory, 166, 185
Dodson, Antoine, 89
Dotcom, Kim, 90, 214n76
Dove, Daniel, 77
downloads, 60, 65, 8081, 132, 134, 16667;
of independently distributed music, 112;
from iTunes, 67, 89, 9192, 107; litigation
against customers for, 6162, 129; and
music sales, 7677; by P2P users, 7677,
153; stream-ripping, 49; Swiss allowance of
free, 82, 193
Drahos, Peter, 174
Dvorak, John C., 59
Dyer, Jeff, 139
Dylan, Bob, 103
economy, US, 1045, 11213, 117
Edison, Thomas, 37
Edwards, Blake, 177
Eisner, Michael, 61
Elberse, Anita, 109
Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), 35,
129, 162, 166, 176, 185
Elite-Torrents, 77
EMI, 96, 100, 130
Eminem, 92
Empire Records, 111
Enemy of All, The (Heller-Roazen), 32
Eshoo, Anna, 187
Espinel, Victoria, 164
European Union and Parliament, 166, 177, 188
Facebook, 9, 87, 198
Fagen, Donald, 52
fair use, 34, 63, 147, 172, 200, 223n17
Fanning, Shawn, 63, 146
Federal Communications Commission (FCC),
38, 47
Federal Trade Commission (FTC), 116
Feinstein, Dianne, 161
50 Cent, 82
file sharing. See peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing
film industry, 62, 75, 114, 177
Flynn, Sean, 174
FM radio, 4649
Fogel, Karl, 166
Foreman, Jack, 15253, 155
format replacement cycle, 41, 43, 4546, 100,
107
INDEX
237
Four Steps to the Epiphany, The (Blank), 139

France, 16869, 177, 255n32
Frankfurt School, 29
Franzen, Benjamin, 185
Fraunhofer, 5859
freemium, 67
Free Press, 162
free software movement, 9, 184, 189
Future of Music Coalition, 91
Galuten, Albhy, 57
gangsta rap, 121
GarageBand, 111
Gaylor, Brett, 185
Geist, Michael, 12223, 166
General Public License (GPL), 18990
Genoa: modern crusade compared to, 46;
piracy crusade by, 13
Germany, 182
Gerrits, Jochem, 133
Gerson, Isak, 179
Gil, Gilberto, 193
Gluck, Marissa, 185
Gnutella, 74
goodwill, 119, 208n35; and badwill, 12628,
130, 133; music industrys loss of, 12,
12027, 130, 13334
Google, 69, 132, 158, 172, 187
Gordon, Steve, 80
Gracenote, 112
graduated response, 164, 165, 169, 224n14
Grassley, Chuck, 115
Gray, Macy, 90
Green, Al, 176
Green Day, 85
Gregersen, Hal, 139
Gregory Brothers, 8889
Griffin, Jim, 15155
Grokster, 75, 177; Supreme Court decision
on, 5, 8, 35, 75, 167
Guo Quan, 176
hackers, 7172, 13132, 187, 190
hardware royalties, 81
Harris, Charles, 25
Hatch, Orrin, 161
Heart, 85
heavy metal, 121
Heller, Michael, 174
Heller-Roazen, Daniel, 32
Henley, Don, 92
High Fidelity (Hornby), 111
238
INDEX
HMV, 100, 110

Ho, Michael, 112
Hollanda, Ana de, 19394
Hollywood Reporter, 95
home studios, 51
home taping, 3334, 36, 49
Hornby, Nick, 111
Hunt, Cassi, 129
iCloud, 67, 118
iHeartRadio, 125
immunity, blanket, 15155
independently produced music, 11112
India, 194
Inducing Infringement of Copyrights Act,
167
innovation, 12, 57, 68, 125, 135, 155; by
Choruss, 15154; by MP3.com, 14951;
music industry hindrances to, 3839,
50, 13839, 14145, 14748, 15054,
15860; by Muxtape, 14246; by MyPlay,
14649; in recording technology, 4849; in
software, 7172, 155; by Uplister, 14042.
See also technology
Innovators DNA, The (Dyer, Gregersen, and
Christensen), 139
In Rainbows (Radiohead), 86
Institute for Policy Innovation, 115
intellectual property, 25, 162, 168, 19697;
calls for abolition of, 19091; effects of
enforcing, 169, 174; and piracy, 32;
public debate over, 8, 18385; Senate
hearing on, 115, 161. See also copyright
Intellectual Property Enforcement
Coordinator (IPEC), 164, 168, 170
Intellectual Property Rights Enforcement
Directive (IPRED, Sweden), 173
International Chamber of Commerce (ICC),
11415
International Federation of the Phonographic
Industry (IFPI), 82, 113, 120, 126; and
copyright lawsuits, 12627, 130; definition
of piracy by, 3132; market data by, 8081,
9699
International Intellectual Property Alliance
(IIPA), 115
international trade agreements, 163, 173;
Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement,
163, 16465, 167, 171, 177, 184, 18688;
Canada-EU Trade Agreement, 163,
16869, 173; Trans-Pacific Partnership,
163, 167, 171, 173, 184
Internet, 58, 71, 142, 176; access to as human

right, 169; kill switch for, 170; speed and
capacity of, 146, 158
internet service providers (ISPs), 167, 170;
CAS agreements with, 16465, 169;
censorship by, 164, 167, 169; immunity
offered to, 15152
iPod, 53, 58, 61, 64, 108
Irenaeus, Saint, 18081
Issa, Darrell, 192, 200, 231n60
iTunes, 1078; and DRM, 64, 67; and music
sales, 11012, 138
Jackson, Michael, 30, 102
James, Rick, 92
Jay-Z, 53
Jefferson, Thomas, 23, 183
Jerkins, Rodney, 103
Jerome, Saint, 18081
job loss claims, 11516
Johns, Adrian, 3233, 84
Johnsen, Andreas, 185
Jones, James P., 77
Jordan, Jim, 19293
Journey, 8990
Kaplan, Benjamin, 23233n76
Karaganis, Joe, 174, 185
Katz, Mark, 50
Kenswil, Larry, 57, 66, 15559
Khanna, Derek, 192
Kickstarter, 88, 112
Knopper, Steve, 5859
Kopimism, 17981, 199, 229n7
Kbler-Ross, Elisabeth, 11, 5760, 62, 66
Kurzweil, Ray, 199
Lady Gaga, 8081
LaHara, Brianna, 128
Latonero, Mark, 185
LAUNCH Media, 60
Leavitt, Alex, 89
Lefsetz, Bob, 79
Lemley, Mark, 131
Lessig, Lawrence, 35, 179, 184, 190
Levitin, Daniel, 19
licenses and licensing, 68, 92, 11718, 138;
cash advances on, 15658, 223n28; for
cloud services, 158; Creative Commons, 9,
85, 190, 193, 231n56; open source, 18991;
refusal to grant, 155, 15758
Liebowitz, Stanley, 9495, 117
LimeWire, 5, 75, 153

Lionsgate, 172
litigation, 5, 6062, 71, 12731, 177; against
customers, 6162, 67, 12730; immunity
offered against, 15154; as more profitable
than licensing, 15758; against MP3.
com, 60, 15051; music industry strategy
toward, 126, 15758, 222n67; against
Napster, 5, 3435, 60; against Pirate Bay,
86, 120; against record companies, 12223
Litman, Jessica, 182, 18485
live music events, 8081
lobbying, 92, 184; for anti-piracy measures,
16163; around copyright laws, 2526, 28,
36, 114
Lockyer, Bill, 163
Lofgren, Zoe, 187
long tail, 107, 112, 216n32
Long Tail, The (Anderson), 112, 216n32
Lopez, Jennifer, 53
Los Angels Times, 61
Lumbleau, Eric, 84
MacNaghten, Lord, 119
Madison, James, 23, 18283
Madonna, 67, 121, 2089n36
magnetic tape, 51, 57, 63, 65
Mahdians, 25
Mail, 8283, 86
Marco Civil da Internet (Brazil), 194
Marconi, Guglielmo, 37
MarkMonitor, 114
Martin, George, 49
Mashed Up (Sinnreich), 19, 4344
Masnick, Michael, 112
Mason, Nick, 84
McCullagh, Declan, 130
McLeod, Kembrew, 185
MediaMatters, 162
medicine, 174, 194
Megaupload, 90, 177, 213n73
Men in Black, 43
metadata, 163, 224n8
MGM Studios, Inc. v. Grokster, Ltd, 5, 8, 35,
75, 167
Mill, John Stuart, 24
minimum advertised pricing (MAP), 1012,
10910
Mitnick, Kevin, 7172, 214n76
Moltke, Henrik, 185
Moores law, 71, 209n1
Morris, Doug, 57, 153
INDEX
239
Motion Picture Association of America

(MPAA), 13132, 163, 17071
MP3, 53, 106, 146; CDs and, 59, 150; and
file sharing, 59, 63, 71; and format
replacement cycle, 41, 4445
MP3.com, 5, 60, 14951
MSN, 64
MTV, 1023
multilayered sound, 5152
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, The (Christie), 69
music, 10, 107; as commodity, 2021, 29; and
consumer culture, 2930; and copyright,
2526, 204n26; as entertainment,
18, 2830; and human culture and
consciousness, 1920, 36, 71; and
marketplace, 19, 2022; and piracy, 3335;
professionalization of, 2122, 24; and
recording technology, 5153; and scores,
22, 2425, 12324. See also record and
music industries
Musicland Group, 110
MusicMetric, 83
MusicNet, 12324, 155
Music Publishers Association (MPA), 26
music sales: digital, 65, 67, 98, 11012, 138;
impact of file sharing on, 7779; industry
narrative on lost, 11, 7677, 9496,
11314; music industry data around,
9699; perfect bubble rise in, 11, 96,
99105, 117; perfect storm decline in,
66, 96, 10513, 117
music sequencers, 52
Mutant Sounds, 84
Muxtape, 14246
MyPlay, 14649
nanotechnology, 197
Napster, 28, 57, 59, 63, 74, 96; litigation
against, 5, 3435, 60; music industry
narrative on, 68, 72, 93; users of, 7778;
vulnerability of, 74
Nash, Michael, 66
National Association of Recording
Merchandisers (NARM), 100101
National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA),
167
National Endowment of the Arts, 191
Nazer, Daniel, 176
Nega, Eskinder, 176
Negroponte, Nicholas, 19798
Netanel, Neil, 183
240
INDEX
Netherlands, 193
New Kids on the Block, 103
New York Times, 72, 80, 94, 158, 163
Next Big Sound, 83
Nielsen SoundScan, 96
Nine Inch Nails, 67, 8587, 208n35
No Electronic Theft (NET) Act, 166
noncommercial reproduction and use, 9,
3335, 60, 166, 190
No Safe Harbor, 191
N Sync, 1034, 107
Obama, Barack, 167, 176
Obama, Michelle, 176
Oberholzer-Gee, Felix, 78
Occupy movement, 186
OConnor, Sinad, 121
Ok Go, 67
Ondrejka, Cory, 66
Online Protection and Enforcement of Digital
Trade (OPEN) Act, 192, 231n60
Open Rights Group, 176
OReilly, Tim, 185
Organisation for Economic Co-operation and
Development (OECD), 97, 116
Ouellette, Justin, 14246, 155, 15758
overdubbing, 49, 51
Pas, El, 173
Pakman, David, 14650, 15455
Paladuk, John, 129
Palmer, Amanda, 8788
Pandora, 11011, 138, 222n1
Pareles, Jon, 158
Pariser, Jennifer, 130
ParSoft Interactive, 13031
Passman, Don, 91
patents, 17576, 189, 191; in medicine, 174,
194
Patriot Act, 62
Patry, William, 166, 224n14, 229n7
Patterson, Lyman Ray, 23
Paul, Les, 49, 51
Paul, Ron, 187
payola, 8384, 121
PC Magazine, 59
peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing, 11, 110; artists
and, 82, 8593; cultural benefits of, 7273,
8285; how it works, 7376; impact of
on marketing and promotion, 72, 8283;
MP3 and, 59, 63, 71; music industry legal
action against, 5, 3435, 60, 71, 90, 177;

music industry narrative on, 4, 36, 54,
72, 7677, 91, 9496; and music sales,
7779; popularity of, 56, 71, 182; revenue
increase caused by, 7981
performance rights royalties, 80, 98
personal use, 61, 82, 193
Pet Sounds (Beach Boys), 108
Petty, Tom, 83
phishers, 175
phonographic effects, 50
Pineda, Arnel, 8990
Pink Panther Strikes Again, The, 177
piracy: definitions and concept of, 3133;
loss estimates from, 1112, 7677, 9496,
11317, 160; music and, 3335; by piracy
crusaders, 13233; pirate technology,
5455; popular depictions of, 3031
piracy crusade: alternatives to, 18895;
bipartisan support for, 161, 18587; claims
of victory in, 56; by Genoa, 16; justifications and rationales for, 12, 91, 19697,
199200; as moral panic, 229n7; music
industry framing of, 3536, 54; opposition
to, 171, 17778, 18588; social and political
consequences of, 67, 1213, 13536, 160,
17176, 199; as threat to democracy, 136,
164, 184; as threat to privacy, 132, 160,
16364, 173. See also anti-piracy agenda;
anti-piracy narrative; litigation
Pirate Bay, 4, 76, 86, 120
Pirate Party, 4, 18182, 184, 191
Pirate Verbatim, 85
pitch correction, 5253
Pitofsky, Robert, 110
Pittman, Bob, 1089
Planet Earth (Prince), 86
Platinum Blue, 5354
Playlist.com, 158
playlists, 107, 141, 155; creation of users own,
108, 125; Muxtape and, 14243
Plotkin, Hal, 131
Poland, 177, 188
Polyphonic HMI, 5354
Portastudio, 52
Presley, Elvis, 30
PressPlay, 12324, 151, 155
Price, Jeff, 112
price fixing, 1012, 10910, 123
Prince, 67, 8687
printing industry, 22, 195
Prioritizing Resources and Organization for

Intellectual Property (PRO-IP) Act, 116,
16668, 172, 186
privacy, 9, 61, 74, 165; piracy crusade threat
to, 132, 160, 16364, 173
professionalization: of artists and musicians,
2122, 24; of music production and
recording, 5054
Protecting Cyberspace as a National Asset
Act, 170
Protecting Intellectual Rights Against Theft
and Expropriation (PIRATE) Act, 168
Protect IP Act (PIPA), 163, 16465, 169,
17172, 186
public domain, 170, 174, 189, 191, 194, 200
Public Knowledge, 162, 164, 176, 185
publishing industry, 2325, 32
punk music, 52
Quilter, Laura, 60
radio, 103, 1078; and advertising, 46, 48;
development and evolution of, 26, 3738,
4647; FM ascendancy in, 10, 4649, 80;
recording industry and, 27, 35, 4449
Radiohead, 67, 8687
Rage Against the Machine, 83
Rakoff, Jed S., 151
ransomware, 17475
record and music industries: and aesthetics,
5051, 53, 107; anticompetitive practices
by, 1012, 10910, 12324; anti-piracy
narrative of, 4, 11, 3536, 54, 6869, 72,
7677, 91, 9396, 11314, 160; artists and,
25, 67, 9192, 103, 12223; blockbuster
economy of, 1025, 1078; broadcastinglabel dichotomy in, 27; cartelization of,
10, 76, 12426, 159; as categories, 910;
computer hacking by, 13132; data of,
67, 8081, 9699, 216n23; dealings with
partners and competitors, 26, 102, 123,
15556; and economy, 1045, 11213,
117; five stages of grief of, 11, 5782;
and format replacement cycle, 41, 43,
4546, 100, 107; and innovation, 3839,
50, 57, 68, 135, 13839, 14148, 15055,
15860; lawsuits by, 5, 3435, 6062, 67,
71, 86, 120, 12730, 15051; litigation
strategy of, 126, 15758, 222n67; lobbying
and campaign contributions by, 92, 117,
16163, 184, 187, 19293; loss of goodwill
INDEX
241
record and music industries: (continued)

by, 12, 12028, 130, 13334; marketing
and promotion by, 72, 8283, 1023, 119;
during perfect bubble, 11, 96, 99105,
117; during perfect storm, 66, 96,
10513, 117; and piracy concept, 3133,
35; piracy loss estimates by, 1112, 7677,
9496, 11317, 160; producers in, 1034;
and professionalism, 50, 125; public image
of, 11922, 125, 128, 13033; and radio,
4449; relations with customers by, 6162,
67, 12530; retail sector in, 66, 100101,
10911; revenue of, 58, 67, 77, 7982,
8687, 98100, 104, 1089, 111, 138, 191;
structure of, 2628, 46; and technology,
17, 2627, 37, 4950, 5457, 93, 13839;
unfair and exploitative labor practices by,
12223. See also anti-piracy agenda; antipiracy narrative; piracy crusade
recording formats, 10, 3945, 100, 107
Recording Industry Association of America
(RIAA), 35, 9192, 104, 132, 145, 17071;
lawsuits by, 5, 6062, 12731; lobbying
and campaign contributions by, 117, 161;
market data of, 67, 9698; piracy narrative
of, 78, 94; poor public image of, 120, 133
recoupment clauses, 9192, 124
Republican Study Committee (RSC),
19293
retail sector, 66, 100101, 10911
Reznor, Trent, 8586, 208n35
Rhapsody, 112
Rhoads, B. Eric, 48
Rietveldt, Melchior, 13233
Rihanna, 53
Robertson, Michael, 14951, 158
Rodger, Will, 131
Rogers, Kenny, 122, 123
Romney, Mitt, 176
Root, The, 91
Rosen, Hilary, 5657, 6061
Ross, Steve, 28
royalties, 9192, 98, 112, 122; advances on,
102; hardware, 81; performance, 80, 98;
synch rights, 80, 98
Russinovich, Mark, 131
Sachs, Joel, 21
Sacks, Oliver, 19
Sam Goody stores, 100, 110
sample-based drum machines, 52
242
INDEX
Sanchez, Julian, 11516

San Francisco Chronicle, 131, 172
Satellite Home Viewer Improvement Act, 92
Saturday Night Fever, 48
Scantlebury, Larry, 128
Schmidt, Andreas, 148
Schmidt, Eric, 163
Schon, Neal, 89
Schrade, Matthias, 182
Schwartz, Rae J., 129
scores, musical, 22, 2425, 12324; copyrighting of, 25, 204n26
secondary liability, 16768
secrecy, 163, 171, 184
security, computer, 132, 17475
Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band (Beatles),
108
Shakira, 8283, 85
Sherman, Cary, 59, 72, 94, 115, 130
shuffle mode, 1078
Sigismund, 3
Silver, Jeremy, 14042, 156, 157, 207n11
Simon & Garfunkel, 103
Sinatra, Frank, 50
Sinde Law (Spain), 173, 187
singularity movement, 199
Slotten, Hugh, 4748
Small, Christopher, 22
Smiers, Joost, 191
Smith, Harry, 8485
Smith, Max, 152
software industry, 11415, 160, 162, 184;
innovation in, 7172
Sohn, Gigi, 170
Solomont, Alan D., 173
Sony, 37, 44, 13132, 153
Sony BMG v. Tenenbaum, 95
Spain, 173, 187
Spears, Britney, 104, 107
SpiralFrog, 67, 209n37
Spitzer, Eliot, 10910
sponsorship, 81
Spotify, 6768, 112, 118, 138
Springsteen, Bruce, 102
Stallman, Richard, 18990
Stargate SG-1, 62
Steely Dan, 52
Stevens, Sufjan, 87
Stigwood, Robert, 48
Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), 116, 16365,
16970, 187
Strachman, Hyman, 167

streaming, 4, 87, 11011; automatic, 147, 150;
benefits to consumers of, 1067
Strengthening and Enhancing Cybersecurity
by Using Research, Education,
Information, and Technology
(SECURE-IT) Act, 16869, 226n33
Strumpf, Koleman, 78
Students for Free Culture, 185
Supreme Court, US, 34, 92, 124, 184;
Grokster decision by, 5, 35, 75, 167
surveillance, 68, 114, 160, 16869, 198
Sweden, 173, 17982
Switzerland, 82, 193
synch rights royalties, 80, 98
takedown notices, 60, 90, 167, 172, 194,
208n19, 213n73
TASCAM, 52
Taylor, Geoff, 67
Taylor, James, 102
Tea Party, 186
technology: bio- and nano-, 197; CD
ripping and burning, 45, 58, 106;
democratization of, 52; digital, 7, 17, 35,
58, 1067, 120, 133, 13839; digital rights
management, 6265; music industrys
love/hate relationship with, 49, 50, 5455,
139; pirate technology, 5455; pitch
correction, 5253; radio broadcast, 26,
4549; recording, 26, 37, 3941, 4854;
rogue, 5455, 75, 93, 126; social shaping
of, 3839. See also innovation
Tehranian, John, 198
Teller, Paul, 192
Terra Firma, 82, 106
Tesla, Nicola, 37
This Business of Music, 11920
3D printing, 196
360 deals, 6768, 7980
Time magazine, 51
TorrentFreak, 175
Tower Records, 100, 110
T-Pain, 52
Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP), 163, 167,
171, 173, 184
Trego vs. Hunt, 119
trolls, patent and copyright, 17576
Tumblr, 143, 146, 223n14
TuneCore, 112
Tusk, Donald, 177, 188
Twain, Shania, 110

Twitter, 9, 8788, 90
unbundling, 1089, 111, 138, 14041, 150
United Kingdom, 34, 119, 169; and copyright,
2223, 171, 193
Universal Music Group (UMG), 92, 151,
153, 155; false copyright claims by, 9091,
213n73; and Muxtape, 14344
Uplister, 14042
Urban, Jennifer, 60
US Chamber of Commerce (USCC), 11415,
162
used music, 111
US Government Accountability Office
(GAO), 116
US Patent and Trademark Office, 176
usufruct, 191
Vaidhyanathan, Siva, 8, 184
van Schijndel, Marieke, 191
venture capitalists, 142, 156
vertical integration, 44
V for Vendetta, 187
Viacom, 103
vinyl records, 42, 44, 108. See also albums
Virgin Megastores, 100, 110
Vivendi Universal, 151
von Lohmann, Fred, 35
Voyager Company, 58
Walls, James, 128
Walmart, 101, 11011
Walton, Gertrude, 128
Warner Brothers, 172
Warner Chappell, 86
Warner Music Group (WMG), 65, 67, 107,
120; and Choruss, 15152, 15556
West, Kanye, 90
Westergren, Tim, 112
Westlaw, 126
White Album (Beatles), 57, 1067
Wikileaks, 173
Wikstrm, Patrik, 10
Williamson, John, 10
Willis, Victor, 92
Wilson, Brian, 49
Wilson, Drew, 78
Winwood, Steve, 85
Wired magazine, 57, 64, 84, 163
work-for-hire, 92
INDEX
243
World Intellectual Property Organization

(WIPO), 16667
Wu, Tim, 18485
Wyden, Ron, 171, 186, 192, 200
Yahoo, 64, 148

Yauch, Adam, 189
Yetnikoff, Walter, 28
YouTube, 8890, 176, 182, 213n73
X Factor, The, 50
Zelnick, Strauss, 6667

ZeroPaid, 78
Zombie, Rob, 92
Yacoub, Rami, 103
244
INDEX

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