because it cut into profits. This time, it was the business of pay telephone numbers that played music over the phone. 'If people can listen to music for free with this radio thing, artists will starve!' This argument was re-used through most of the century, with the word 'radio' replaced by the most recent technology.
In the 1930s, silent movies were phased out by movies with audio tracks. Every theater had previously employed an orchestra that played music to accompany the silent movies, and now, these were out of a job. It is quite conceivable that this is the single worst technical development for professional performers. Their unions demanded guaranteed jobs for these performers in varying propositions.
In the 1960s, the copyright industry was fretting over people taping music off of radio, and tried to have the practice banned. The debate died off about the same time it was pointed out that this ban was technically impossible with anything less than installing cameras in people's living rooms.
The 1970s saw the advent of the cassette tape, which is when the copyright industry really went all-out in proclaiming their entitlement. Ads saying 'Home taping is killing music!' were everywhere. One band responded by subtly changing the message by changing 'music' to 'music industry,' and 'We left this side [of their tape] blank, so you can help.' It saw many other parodies, too; regardless, the copyright industry were acting very seriously on the message.
The 1970s also saw another significant shift, where DJs started taking the place of live dance music. Musicians' unions and the copyright industry went ballistic over this, and suggested a 'disco fee' that would be charged at locations playing disco (recorded) music, to be collected by private organizations under governmental mandate and redistributed to live bands. This produces heartly laughter today, but that laughter stops sharp with the realization that the disco fee was actually introduced, and still exists.
The 1980s is a special chapter with the advent of video recording. The copyright industry's famous quote when testifying before the US Congress — where the film lobby's highest representative said that '
Also in the late 1980s, we saw the complete flop of the Digital Audio Tape (DAT). A lot of this can be ascribed to the fact that the copyright industry had been allowed to put its politics into the design: The cassette, although technically superior to the analog Compact Cassette, was so deliberately unusable for copying music that people rejected it flat outright. This is an example of a technology that the copyright industry succeeded in killing, even though I doubt it was intentional: They just got their wishes as to how it should work to not disrupt the status quo.
In 1994, the Fraunhofer Institute published a prototype implementation of its digital coding technique that would revolutionize digital audio. It allowed CD-quality audio to take one-tenth of the disk space, which was very valuable in this time, when a typical hard drive would be just a couple of gigabytes. Technically known as MPEG-1 Audio Layer III, it was quickly shortened to 'MP3' in everyday speak. The copyright industry screamed again, calling it a technology that only can be used for criminal activity. The first successful MP3 player, the Diamond Rio, saw the light in 1998. It had 32 megabytes of memory. Despite good sales, the copyright industry sued its maker, Diamond Multimedia, into oblivion: While the lawsuit was eventually struck down, the company did not recover from the burden of defending. The monopoly middlemen tried aggressively to have MP3 players banned, just like every previous piece of new technology.
The century ended with the copyright middlemen pushing through a new law in the United States called the Digital Millennium Copyright Act. For the first time, the copyright industry managed to introduce intermediary liability — as in making people liable in a court of law for merely carrying a signal which is broadcast by somebody else. Just like if you put up a public wall, and would become responsible for posters that other people put up on it: Not sane anywhere, but this isn't about sanity, it is about regulatory captures and enshrining the continued profit of monopolists into books of law.
The century also ended on a positive note, as Napster hit the light of day in 1999. Deservingly, the middlemen's handling of Napster is described as as a textbook example of an industry business failure in a delusion of entitlement. In the final section, we'll take a look at how all the monopoly industries joined together to hold the entire economy for ransom.
Toyota struck at the heart of the American soul in the 1970s, and all her politicians started carrying mental “The End Is Nigh” signs. The most American things of all — cars! The American Cars! — weren’t good enough for the American people. They all bought Toyota instead. This was an apocalypse-grade sign that United States was approaching its end as an industrial nation, unable to compete with Asia.
The period of 1960 to 2010 is marked by two things: one, the record-label-driven creepage of the copyright monopoly into the noncommercial, private domain where it was always a commercial-only monopoly before (“home taping is illegal” and such nonsense) and the monopoly therefore threatening fundamental human rights, and two, the corporate political expansion of the copyright monopoly and other monopolies.
When it was clear to politicians that the United States would no longer be able to maintain its economic dominance by producing anything industrially valuable or viable, many committees were formed and tasked with coming up with the answer to one crucial question: How can the US maintain its global dominance if (or when) it is not producing anything competitively valuable?
The response came from an unexpected direction: Pfizer.
The president of Pfizer, Edmund Pratt, had a furious op-ed piece in a New York Times on July 9, 1982 titled “Stealing from the Mind.” It fumed about how third world countries were stealing from them. (By this, he referred to making medicine from their own raw materials with their own factories using their own knowledge in their own time for their own people, who were frequently dying from horrible but curable third-world conditions.) Major policymakers saw a glimpse of an answer in Pfizer’s and Pratt’s thinking, and turned to Pratt’s involvement in another committee directly under the President. This committee was the magic ACTN: Advisory Committee on Trade Negotiations.
What the ACTN recommended, following Pfizer’s lead, was so daring and provocative that nobody was really sure whether to try it out: The US would try linking its trade negotiations and foreign policy. Any country who didn’t sign lopsided “free trade” deals that heavily redefined value would be branded in a myriad of bad ways, the most notable being the “Special 301 watchlist.” This list is supposed to be a list of nations not respecting copyright enough. A majority of the world’s population is on it, among them Canada.
So the solution to not producing anything of value in international trade was to redefine “producing,” “anything,” and “value” in an international political context, and to do so by bullying. It worked. The ACTN blueprints were set in motion by US Trade Representatives, using unilateral bullying to push foreign governments into enacting legislation that favored American industry interests, bilateral “free trade” agreements that did the same, and multilateral agreements that raised the bar worldwide in protection of American interests.
In this way, the United States was able to create an exchange of values where they would rent out blueprints and get finished products from those blueprints in return. This would be considered as a fair deal under the “free trade” agreements which redefined value artificially.
The entire US monopolized industry was behind this push: The copyright industries, the patent industries, all of them. They went forum shopping and tried to go to WIPO — repeating the hijack of the record industry in 1961 — to seek legitimacy and hostship for a new trade agreement that would be marketed as “Berne Plus”.
At this point, it became politically necessary for the US to join the Berne Convention for credibility reasons, as WIPO is the overseer of Berne.
However, WIPO saw right through this scheme and more or less kicked them right out the door. WIPO was not created to give any country that kind of advantage over the rest of the world. They were outraged at the shameless attempt to hijack the copyright and patent monopolies.
So, another forum was needed. The US monopoly industry consortium approached GATT — the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade — and managed to get influence there. A major process was initiated whereby about half of the participating countries in GATT were tricked, coerced or bullied into agreeing with a new agreement under GATT, an agreement which would lock in the Berne Convention and strengthen the US industry considerably on top of that by redefining “producing,” “thing,” and “value.” This agreement was called TRIPs. Upon ratification of the TRIPs agreement, the GATT body was renamed WTO, the World Trade Organization. The 52 GATT countries choosing to stay out of the WTO would soon find themselves in an
