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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 entertainment 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 development 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, Congress realized what side of their bread had butter on it and decided not to criminalize the dominant form of entertainment in America. 

But there was the problem of paying artists. The Constitution sets out the purpose of American copyright: to promote the useful arts and sciences. The composers had a credible story that they\'d do less composing if they weren\'t paid for it, so Congress needed a fix. Here\'s what they came up with: anyone who paid a music publisher two cents would have the right to make one piano roll of any song that publisher published. The publisher couldn\'t say no, and no one had to hire a lawyer at $200 an hour to argue about whether the payment should be two cents or a nickel. 

This compulsory license is still in place today: when Joe Cocker sings \"With a Little Help from My Friends,\" he pays a fixed fee to the Beatles\' publisher and away he goes -- even if Ringo hates the idea. If you ever wondered how Sid Vicious talked Anka into letting him get a crack at \"My Way,\" well, now you know. 

That compulsory license created a world where a thousand times more money was made by a thousand times more creators who made a thousand times more music that reached a thousand times more people. 

This story repeats itself throughout the technological century, every ten or fifteen years. Radio was enabled by a voluntary blanket license -- the music companies got together and asked for a consent decree so that they could offer all their music for a flat fee. Cable TV took a compulsory: the only way cable operators could get their hands on broadcasts was to pirate them and shove them down the wire, and Congress saw fit to legalize this practice rather than screw around with their constituents\' TVs. 

Sometimes, the courts and Congress decided to simply take away a copyright -- that\'s what happened with the VCR. When Sony brought out the VCR in 1976, the studios had already decided what the experience of watching a movie in your living room would look like: they\'d licensed out their programming for use on a machine called a Discovision, which played big LP-sized discs that were read-only. Proto-DRM. 

The copyright scholars of the day didn\'t give the VCR very good odds. Sony argued that their box allowed for a fair use, which is defined as a use that a court rules is a defense against infringement based on four factors: whether the use transforms the
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