Chapter 5. Understanding Copyright, Piracy, and Other Legal Issues

People have always copied music illegally. I’m sure that back in the Tin Pan Alley days that illicit scribes were out there hand copying the sheet music of the day. With the advent of tape recording machines in the late 1950s, there were folks who held a microphone in front of their radio consoles to record music from the airwaves. In the 1960s and 1970s, low-priced audiocassette recorders led to lots of LPs being copied to cassette tape. And today, of course, the youngsters download music for free from file-sharing and BitTorrent sites.

Now, I’m not condoning this behavior, just acknowledging that it exists today, has always existed, and will probably always exist. That doesn’t make it right, and in fact it is somewhat harmful to the artists who work hard to create that music. For that reason, it helps to have a little background in copyright law—what’s legal and what’s not—so you can make up your own mind about the issue.