Piracy and Panacea in the Dissemination of Music in the Late Eighteenth Century

Abstract

This paper is concerned with two decades when musical piracy was rampant, the 1770s and 1780s; with two cities where it flourished: Paris, a performing and publishing capital, and Leipzig, a centre of music copying; and with two imaginative men who sought panaceas or, in their view, rational solutions to the problems of piracy in music. One of these was relatively famous, Johann Gottlob Breitkopf; the other, Christian Gottfried Thomas, virtually unknown.

Initial findings of a gap analysis of the digital piracy literature: six undiscovered countries

“…In addition to physical products, another focus has been the duplication of intellectual products, and there is a rich body of prior literature that focuses on this aspect of piracy (Besen and Raskind, 1991; Shadlen et al , 2005; Kiema, 2008; Gopal and Sanders, 1998). For example, Brook (1975) and Stone (1971) discuss the duplication of musical works by hand for the purposes of satisfying eager fans who lacked the funds or social networks to acquire these musical items legally. Later work described the threat posed by the offset press in duplicating books and other written works, with a high degree of accuracy at low effort and cost (O'Hare, 1982; Shapiro and Varian, 1999).…”

“…A second body in the literature corpus is research that focuses music piracy. There is a long history of prior research into and commentary on piracy of music products, notably with regard to sheet music and the ease with which it could be duplicated (Epstein, 1974; Brook, 1975; Pesserilo, 1978). More recent focus on digital piracy has concentrated on pirated digital music and media files (Gopal et al , 2004; Chiou et al , 2005; d' Astous et al , 2005), notably as MP3s (Easley et al , 2003; Lysonski and Durvasula, 2008).…”