Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright by Monika Dommann

Abstract

Reviewed by: Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright by Monika Dommann Peter Shirts Authors and Apparatus: A Media History of Copyright. By Monika Dommann. Translated by Sarah Pybus. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019. [xiii, 263 p. ISBN 9781501709920 (hardcover), $45.95; ISBN 9781501734984 (e-book), price varies.] Illustrations, bibliography, index. Is copyright legislation shaped by media technology innovations, or does author protection move innovation forward? This is one of the major questions that Monika Dommann seeks to complicate in Authors and Apparatus. Dommann, a professor at the University of Zurich specializing in the economic and legal history of media, data, and culture, shows that the progress of author protection in history is not clear cut. How we define authors, what type of control is granted, and extralegal cultural practices and agreements all affect the level of protection at any one time. The path copyright takes is anything but linear and predicable—though we can learn from the responses to each new technological development, which turn out to be not all that different from reactions to previous technological interruptions. This book, first published in German in 2014, is organized roughly in chronological order as a series of ten cases studies, with framing introduction and conclusion, and a brief section on further reading. The case studies are organized into three periods: 1850–1915 (“Part I: Writing and Recording”), 1915–45 (“Part II: Collecting Agencies and Research Materials”), and 1945– 80 (“Part III: Private Copies and Universal Standards”). Throughout the book, Dommann traces the copyright disputes related to new technologies of copying: music recordings and photocopies. The author also puts the history of Europe and the US and their respective copyright systems in conversation with each other, which has not been done before in a study of this length. In another duality, the author describes how various stakeholder groups vacillate between protecting creators and valuing the free flow of information. Part 1, the early history of copyright, covers debates over new technologies in music such as the development of mechanical instruments (music boxes, barrel organs, and the pianola) through early sound recordings. The result was the invention of the compulsory license [End Page 442] system in the US, which was later exported to parts of Europe. This license system approach generally favored business control over author protection. The author also briefly covers debates around early photographic reproduction of text—debates perhaps more about information dissemination than copyright. Of the three parts, part 1 is perhaps the most difficult read, consisting mainly of opinions of legal scholars and court decisions furthest removed from our current systems of copyright. In part 2, covering mainly the interwar period, Dommann examines the rise of authors’ collecting agencies around the world to capitalize on the public performance of music. She also covers the development of microfilm and increased international cooperation in information sharing. Together, these cases show that often only particular groups were allowed at copyright negotiating tables. As Dommann makes explicit in the conclusion, copyright will always be contested because it establishes ownership over the expression of ideas, rewarding some and denying others. The author even shows how the mid-twentieth-century fight over who collected radio royalties in the US, a result of how copyright was framed, may explain the rapid popularization of southern, rural, oral-based music. Part 3 may be for me the most compelling of the three parts, covering the invention of magnetic tape in Germany (including the spread of soundcollecting culture as an eerie precedent to the free culture of the internet), the development of the photocopier and related legal dispute over library copies, the legal ramifications of database input, and the debate over the ownership of folk music. In the end, Dommann demonstrates that copyright has been in crisis since at least the 1960s, if not earlier, and often stakeholders find solutions (sometimes temporary) outside a legal framework. For example, the legal battle over recording device fees in the early 1940s led to theorizing the approaches that would become digital rights management. Also, the debate over who should profit from oral traditions (yes, this is the Lomax controversy) led to new discussions about protecting traditional knowledge outside of...