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

Democracy of Sound is the first book to examine music piracy in the United States from the dawn of sound recording to the rise of Napster and online file-sharing. It asks why Americans stopped thinking of copyright as a monopoly - a kind of necessary evil-and came to see intellectual propertyas sacrosanct and necessary for the prosperity of an "information economy." Recordings only became eligible for federal copyright in 1972, following years of struggle between pirates, musicians, songwriters, broadcasters, and record companies over the right to own sound. Beginning in the 1890s, the book follows the competing visions of Americans who proposed ways to keep obscure and noncommercial music in circulation, preserve out-of-print recordings from extinction, or simply make records more freely and cheaply available. Genteel jazz collectors swapped and copiedrare records in the 1930s; radicals pitched piracy as a mortal threat to capitalism in the 1960s, while hip-hop DJs from the 1970s onwards reused and transformed sounds to create a freer and less regulated market for mixtapes. Each challenged the idea that sound could be owned by anyone. Theconflict led to the contemporary stalemate between those who believe that "information wants to be free" and those who insist that economic prosperity depends on protecting intellectual property. The saga of piracy also shows how the dubbers, bootleggers, and tape traders forged new social networks that ultimately gave rise to the social media of the twenty first century. Democracy of Sound is a colorful story of people making law, resisting law, and imagining how law might shape the futureof music, from the Victrola and pianola to iTunes and BitTorrent.

Alex Sayf Cummings is Assistant Professor of History at Georgia State University.

Introduction
Part One: The Birth and Growth of Piracy, 1877-1955
1. Music, Machines, and Monopoly
2. Collectors, Con Men, and the Struggle for Property Rights
3. Piracy and the Rise of New Media

Part Two: The Legal Backlash, 1945-1998
4. Counterculture, Popular Music, and the Bootleg Boom
5. The Criminalization of Piracy
6. Deadheads, Hip Hop, and the Possibility of Compromise
7. The Global War on Piracy
Conclusion: Piracy as Social Media
Notes
Index