Some Minor Historical Notes on Copyright and Censorship

[melannen]

otw_news recently posted a link to an article which discussed Arthurian legend as fanfic. It was neat to see that being acknowledged, though as we all know of course fanfic goes back much farther than the 13th century: it goes back to the Aeneid (an early Gary Stu), to the Argonautica (early crossover crack), to the Book of Job (the original example of Snacky's Law), to the Epic of Gilgamesh (which I tend to describe as the world's first recorded slash fic, since earlier Gilgamesh stories were somewhat less myopically focussed on the manly devotion of Gilgamesh and Enkidu.)

Really, it's a bit silly to talk about the history of fanfic, since it wasn't until just the last three hundred years or so that anything other than fanfic has been regularly acknowledged as proper literature.

So let's talk about media piracy instead.

The patron saint of media piracy, of course, is St. Columba of Iona, who borrowed a psalter from St. Finnian, sometime in the 6th century CE, made a copy, and refused to give St. Finnian the copy when he returned the original. St. Finnian demanded the copy back, St. Columba declared it was his, and they appealed to King Diarmait of Ireland, who declared "every cow its calf, every book its copy," in favor of St. Finnian. This being 6th century Ireland, it ended in Columba raising his clan in rebellion against the king, and around 3,000 men died in the Battle of Cúl Dreimhne before Columba went into voluntary exile in Scotland to avoid excommunication.

He took his copy of the psalter with him when he went, though!

I've never really been able to work up much guilt about media piracy, because a) I've gotten well under 3,000 people killed as a result, and b) none of the arguments against it apply to me. That's been driven home with real numbers to me lately: LibraryThing recently added a column to its catalog listings where one can input where one acquired a book, and I've managed to fill it in back to Christmas 2009 (so far.)

Of about ~500 items added to my library in that time (yes, I know I have a problem, but I also still have a few inches of shelf space :P), here is where I got them:

219 were acquired at library sales, local yard sales and flea markets, swap tables, thrift stores, special-event charity book sales, and the like.
87 were inherited.
76 were hand-me-downs from friends and relatives.
44 were free promotional copies from a publisher.
37 were birthday and christmas gifts.
34 were from actual for-profit used bookstores
and
9 were bought new.

Of those 9: 3 were from a closeout discount store; 2 were course packets from the university bookstore; 4 were from museum stores. And all but three of the gifts were used books, too.

I'd known it worked out more-or-less like that anyway, but it's neat to see hard numbers! Dear publishers and other copyright owners: stop worryin', ya'll ain't gettin' no money from me nohow.

I get most of my music the same way I get my books: passed on from friends, from the library, or found while thumbing through boxes and boxes of old LPs and slightly-less-old CDs at flea markets and thrift stores. I can't give you the numbers, because I buy a lot less music than books, so I don't bother to track them the same way, but I think the last music I bought new was a Tom Lehrer CD with a gift card I got for high school graduation. I have found some really amazing stuff in those boxes of old LPS, and, yeah, I do need to get back on track with digitizing some of it to share.

So a few months back I was in a new thrift store that recently opened in the area, and I found a record that was slightly different than any I'd seen before - bigger than a 45 or 78, smaller than an LP, and heavy. The label was printed with "Duodisc aluminum base", and under it, in handwritten ball-point pen, "3-22-47, Bing Crosby, Dennis Day, quartet"

I very quickly realized that what I had in my hands was popular music that had been stolen by immoral copyright pirates sixty-five years ago. No wonder the music publishing had completely died out by the 1950s, if people were making copies of stuff and passing them around for free! Just imagine what music today might have been like if there had still been a profitable recording industry when Elvis and the Beatles were performing.

Obviously I bought it.

I put off ripping it, though, because everything the internet was telling me was that I might only get one chance: Duodisc, and other home recording discs, weren't really made to last, and there were very scary pictures of Duodisc records where the recording surface had literally been flaked off by the process of being digitized.

But I finally decided to do it today, and OMG. Having listened to it a few times and messed with the effects enough to figure out what the songs were, and then done some googling: it is even better than music that was pirated sixty-five years ago.

It is in fact a recording of the relevant bits of the 16 March 1947 Jack Benny radio show, widely notorious for the fact that Bing Crosby forgot he was being broadcast live and said "Hell" on air to a national audience in mid-afternoon, garnering over 5,000 write-in complaints. And apparently a thriving network of bootleg recordings in under a week, if the 3/22/47 date is when my copy was made.

:D :D :D And you thought YouTube had changed things! fuck censorship

A clean copy of the whole episode can be downloaded in RM format from OTR.net's Jack Benny archive, if you're interested in hearing it.

If you would rather have a digital copy of the sixty-five-year-old pirated version, though, well, here it is, all three glorious minutes of it:

Who The Hell?

Yes, the sound quality is fairly crap. I could probably improve it some if I a) got some actual record-cleaning fluid to clean the record and b) bought a needle cartridge meant for 78s rather than LPs and c) learned how to use Audacity better (why does the Hard Limiter not work at all? Why?)

On the other hand, it's surprisingly good for a 65-year-old home recording that was pulled out of a mildewed cardboard box in the back room of a seedy thrift store, with no sleeve and part of the lacquer already flaking off the edge. It's only been altered by me upping the volume and running some click reduction on it; all the skips are part of the original recording, not damage to the record, and the issues in the first 45 seconds seem to be due to a mistake in the original recording process, too (it gets much better after those first 45 seconds.)

And if you jump to about 2:30, you can distinctly hear Bing Crosby miss a high note and then say, "Who the hell picked this key, Dennis Day?"

Oh Bing. Just when I'm starting to almost admit that I've gotten into bandom, you remind me that there have always been rock stars, long before rock'n'roll, and that I missed nothing by listening to you in college instead of those newfangled emo bands. (Also: there has always been RPS. I still don't quite believe that a) Road to Bali exists, and that b) given it exists, there is no Bing Crosby slash on the AO3.)

Comments

Yes...

[ysabetwordsmith]

People are also forgetting that they don't have a captive audience anymore. There are now plenty of viable alternatives to conventional publishing. If readers and/or writers find that those meet their needs better, then that is where they will go.

Same holds true with copyright and its alternatives such as creative commons. Copyright isn't a natural law; it's just an idea that some people made up. If people cease to agree with it, then it will lose ground and eventually morph into a new form or cease to exist entirely. I would prefer to have a healthy copyright system, but if that isn't feasible, then some other system can be created and used instead. What I care about is knowing who created the stuff I'm looking at, and being able to profit from my own work.