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ing about the artists, but the labels are The Man, who cares what
happens to you?”
To understand what DRM does to artists, you need to under-
stand how copyright and technology interact. Copyright is in-
herently technological, since the things it addresses — copying,
transmitting, and so on — are inherently technological.
The piano roll was the first system for cheaply copying music.
It was invented at a time when the dominant form of entertain-
ment in America was getting a talented pianist to come into your
living room and pound out some tunes while you sang along. The
music industry consisted mostly of sheet-music publishers.
The player piano was a digital recording and playback system.
Piano-roll companies bought sheet music and ripped the notes
printed on it into 0s and 1s on a long roll of computer tape, which
they sold by the thousands — the hundreds of thousands — the
millions. They did this without a penny’s compensation to the
publishers. They were digital music pirates. Arrrr!
Predictably, the composers and music publishers went nutso.
Sousa showed up in Congress to say that:
These talking machines are going to ruin the artistic develop-
ment of music in this country. When I was a boy...in front of
every house in the summer evenings, you would find young
people together singing the songs of the day or old songs.
Today you hear these infernal machines going night and day.
We will not have a vocal chord left. The vocal chord will be
eliminated by a process of evolution, as was the tail of man
when he came from the ape.
The publishers asked Congress to ban the piano roll and to create
a law that said that any new system for reproducing music should
be subject to a veto from their industry association. Lucky for us,
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