Changes

In our interview we discuss not only his research on music piracy, but his views on whether traditional books face the same fate as vinyl and CDs.

It’s a bit of a funny story—at least to the extent that a story about a dissertation can be funny. I had gone to grad school with the intention of doing urban history, writing about the landscape, built environment, etc. My goal was to work with Elizabeth Blackmar, who has done a lot of incredible work about space, housing, property rights and so forth. However, in my second year I took a course in the School of Art at Columbia called “Open Source Culture,” and it got me thinking about the issues of copyright and technology that had been causing so much controversy at the time, particularly in terms of file-sharing. So I sort of made a switch from focusing on property in the physical sense of land and buildings to intellectual property.

The question that I found so urgent at the time was: if we are, as is so often said, in an information economy or a knowledge economy, then what happens to that form of capitalism when anyone can copy anything, at any time? This is going to become even more of an issue as 3D printing rapidly evolves—we’ll be copying not just music and books, but sofas and hedge-trimmers before long.

'''The ingenuity of music pirates and bootleggers is astounding. You describe how people in the Communist world used x-ray plates to make records. What do you think drives people to copy and share music? Did music companies make a mistake in trying to suppress this urge through legal action throughout the second half of the 20th century?'''

That is a tough question. It’s not surprising that record labels, music publishers and the like wanted to suppress copying. No business wants to cede part of its market—or at least part of consumer demand—to anyone else, and most institutions tend to prefer the status quo. I think copyright interests often had a short-sighted view of how music could work as a business. Some artists and labels saw radio as a mortal threat in the 1930s and didn’t want their records played on the air, which seems funny in retrospect since 20 years later the labels would be plying DJs with bribes and blow to get their records on the air. Radio airplay turned out to be a great thing for selling records.

It seems to me that we might be recovering this idea of the public good when you look at recent activism against the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), as well as the Supreme Court’s very good decision in the Myriad Genetics case. I’m not much of an optimist, but I think the book at least shows there’s a back-and-forth, a push-and-pull. That’s the idea behind the title—there was a “democracy of sound” in the sense that democracy involves a lot of friction, a lot of sharp elbows and contention. The fact that there has been a fight at all is a source of hope.