Past music piracy

A couple of interesting snippets of previous examples of copyright infringements of intellectual property i.e. piracy. Music piracy dates back to at least 1897 according to this scan from the NY Times. Canadian pirates flooded the US market with cheap copies of the latest popular songs, well copies of sheet music that is. It does not say if anyone pirated wax cylinders too.

An interesting comment on a Slashdot article on this mentions even earlier piracy of material :

"In ancient Rome, it was completely ordinary for an audience member to transcribe a poetry recital, hand it over to amanuenses to massively copy, and then sell it in the marketplace with no money going back to the creator. Even poets didn't have a problem with it. The only protest I'm aware of in the literature is Martial's unhappiness that some talentless fellow was putting his own name on the transcription of Martial, and plagiarism is rather separate from copying without authorization."

Of course in both cases it did not kill off the entertainment industries of the time. Just as home taping didn't kill music in the 1980s.