Wikipedia talk:United States Education Program/Courses/Politics of Piracy (Kevin Gorman and Katie Gilmore)/Timeline/Schedule/8

I found Adrian John's article on early 20th century sheet music piracy fascinating, seeing as I previously knew nothing about the subject. Digital music piracy is often discussed as if it is a new occurrence, while this forgotten history of sheet music proves otherwise. While the same issues of intellectual property, mass culture, media companies' control over the industry, etc. abounded during this time, there are some important differences to recognize. The early 20th century's lack of digital technology provided greater privacy for many pirates. Purchasers of pirated sheet music were protected by secrecy; once they paid for several copies of music they could walk home without the trace of an IP address. The publishing industry focused on larger distributors, and the unfortunate small-scale sheet music peddlers. Nowadays everyone is implicated in piracy. One could even say that the main pirated music distributors are better protected than small-scale consumers seeing as they have greater resources to hide their traces. Another important aspect is the greater support for public goods apparent at that time. As Willetts testified, there was support for a train monopoly that provided transportation for all. In our age of extreme privatization, there is little support for such a public good. Seeing as this was over 100 years ago, Johns may be focusing upon the support for music piracy more than was apparent at the time, similarly to how our culture vilifies piracy while often ignoring the popular support for piracy that does exist quietly. Even in this culture of providing for the public, however, piracy was still attacked by the government, possibly leading to the even more intense struggle against piracy that we have today. EHammid (talk) 23:57, 3 April 2012 (UTC)