Reading List: Democracy of Sound

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