Hollywood Sounds the Alarm

Enough was enough. The nation had to be warned of the danger crouching at its doorstep.

It was 1982 and a few of Hollywood’s finest, including Clint Eastwood, appeared before a congressional subcommittee. They had come to warn of a new technology that, as one explained, posed as great a threat to the American public “as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.”

It was a “great tidal wave” that would crash on the American film industry, causing it to “bleed and bleed and hemorrhage.”

What could possibly wreak such havoc? Jack Valenti, president of the Motion Picture Association of America explained, it was “the video cassette recorder and its necessary companion called the blank tape.”

As he shared stats on the growing popularity among families to record television shows and then skip the commercials, he noted in passing that his family had their own collection of tapes.

Representative Kastenmeier interrupted, “Do you consider yourself and your family infringers when you engage in that practice?”

Valenti dodged the question, explaining that the studios did not intend to prosecute consumers for recording at home.

Kastenmeier interrupted again, “That wasn’t my question.”

Yes, Valenti confessed, “I am taking somebody else’s copyrighted material without their consent and I know damn well I am infringing.”

The very technology that Valenti feared, he already found irresistible.

A Very Happy Birthday

Like Valenti’s family, I also found this technology irresistible. I still remember my seventh birthday party, also in 1982. My mom rented a VCR and a cassette of Disney’s Swiss Family Robinson. It was earth-shattering. I could watch the movie that I chose, whenever I wanted, and as many times as I wanted… until we had to return the VCR the next day.

Today, with the near-infinite control over programming that we have, it seems absurd that I was so elated over such little choice. But at the time, the broadcasters were in charge, not the audience. The VCR flipped the script a bit, and I loved it.

Hollywood… did not love it as much.

As Valenti explained, the average cost to make a film was $20 million and eight out of ten movies did not recoup the costs in theaters. This was a risky business and the VCR threatened to erode the aftermarket sales and licensing revenues. It also could eliminate the value in running commercials if viewers could just skip them.

Valenti’s solution was for Congress to recognize the rights of the “creative property owners” and provide the studios a portion of the royalties from the sales of VCRs and blank tapes. Consumers could enjoy this new found freedom and copyright holders could be compensated.

Hollywood vs. Sony

Valenti was not the first to defend the film industry against this new threat. A few years before, in 1976, Universal City Studios and Walt Disney Productions sued Sony, the manufacturer of the Betamax videocassette recorder. They argued that Sony produced a technology used to reproduce their copyrighted material without permission.

The case eventually landed in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1984, and Sony won, on a 5-4 decision. The reasons boiled down to the idea that a manufacturer of a technology with substantial legitimate uses shouldn’t automatically be punished because someone uses it unlawfully. And, recording a program to watch it later was just “time-shifting,” which qualified as “fair use.”

In addition, the majority opinion noted that there wasn’t sufficient evidence of market harm and that there could actually be a silver lining. More people might watch a broadcast because now they could record it to watch later, which could increase the value of the rerun rights.

Meanwhile, as the judges deliberated in the court, entrepreneurs were experimenting in the market.

The Rise of the Video Stores

The same year that Universal and Disney sued Sony, Andre Blay, a servicer of video equipment in Michigan, had an idea. He reached out to studios inquiring about selling their movies on videocassettes. An executive at Fox, Steven Roberts, was intrigued by the idea and made a deal.

Blay launched the Video Club of America to sell the tapes, which he hadn’t produced yet, and 9,000 people joined. Consumers were eager to own their favorite films, one veterinarian from North Carolina called immediately, provided his credit card information, and ordered all 50 titles at $50 each. Blay was on to something.

His partnership with Fox caught the attention of another entrepreneur, George Atkinson. He was struggling with a small business renting out super 8 projectors and screens for home parties. If people would rent a projector, perhaps they would rent a cassette tape, he thought. Others disagreed, noting “that Americans are not a renting public…” Atkinson would prove them wrong.

He purchased one Beta and one VHS copy of the 50 titles available. Then he opened a video-rental business in Los Angeles in 1977. Now, movie lovers could join his rental club and take home a movie they wanted at a fraction of the cost to own it. And they did.

Over the next year, the price of a VCR dropped below $1,000 and by the end of 1978 Blay’s company, Magnetic Video, had sold a quarter of a million cassettes and Atkinson was franchising rental stores across the country.

But this new business model troubled Valenti and the studios. Under the “first-sale doctrine,” a store could purchase a cassette once and rent it hundreds of times without paying the copyright owner another dime. The rentals were perfectly legal, but Hollywood wanted a share of the growing business. It was one more reason Valenti turned to Congress in 1982, warning that the VCR threatened the future of American filmmaking.

The Displacive Fallacy

Three years after Valenti’s testimony, Hollywood was back in Washington D.C., not to control the VCR market, but to wine and dine it.

Disney and Paramount hosted lavish lunches and concerts for some 6,000 video dealers. And with good reason. In 1985, consumer spending on videocassette sales and rentals was approaching theatrical box office receipts, around $3.5 billion. The VCR had created an enormous new business, and movie theaters weren’t going anywhere.

By 1987, even Valenti had changed his tune. Speaking to the Video Software Dealers Association, he acknowledged “once we were adversaries, now we are not.”

What had Hollywood missed?

Daniel Boorstin, then Librarian of Congress, had a name for it: the “displacive fallacy.” We tend to assume that each new technology will replace the old. Television will replace books, video will kill the radio star. But technological change isn’t necessarily a zero-sum contest. New technologies can create new opportunities for the old.

Hollywood wasn’t wrong to worry about copyright infringement or the erosion of its existing business. But its focus on what it might lose made it harder to appreciate what consumers and entrepreneurs might create.

For Valenti, the VCR threatened Hollywood’s control over its movies. For a seven-year-old boy, it meant getting to watch a movie he chose at his birthday party. For George Atkinson, it was an opportunity to build a business around that newfound freedom.

The VCR gave audiences more control, entrepreneurs new opportunities, and Hollywood an entirely new market. It turns out the VCR wasn’t a strangler after all. It was quite the opposite.

He owned a small ironworks company and was preparing for an upcoming employee retreat. He was especially excited for the entertainment that he had arranged: himself… singing. Only one problem for his employees: he was a terrible singer.

But he had a secret weapon, local musician Daisuke Inoue, who frequently played his accompaniment at the local bar.

Inoue had a special talent on keyboards and the vibraphone. He could follow singers, adjusting the beat and even the key to match their “creative” renditions of familiar songs. But, he couldn’t make this particular trip.

So instead, he recorded himself and a few other musicians on a portable reel-to-reel tape machine. The business owner used the backing tracks, the show went on, and it worked.

Daisuke Inoue had saved the day, and in the process had just replaced himself with a machine. But he didn’t stop there, soon he would create a device that would replace musicians across Japan. But Inoue’s karaoke machine would do something far more surprising: turn millions of ordinary listeners into performers.

The Substitution Section

For as long as humans have had voices, we’ve been singing. The trouble is that accompaniment can get expensive pretty quickly.

However, in postwar Japan, new technology was offering some help but with limitations. Yamaha’s “Electone” could sound like a one-man band, but you still needed someone to play it. Jukeboxes offered instant music, but the singers were already on the songs, and the key and tempo weren’t always amateur-friendly. Reel-to-reel tape allowed some Japanese nightclub owners to experiment with recording their pianists for customers to sing along, but selecting a song meant a lot of rewinding and fast-forwarding.

Inoue’s tapes for that local businessman suggested a better way. After seeing a car stereo jukebox that used the new 8-track loop tape format, he had an idea. He modified the tape so that a singer could immediately select one of four songs. This instant selection was the critical innovation. Instead of finding a musician, requesting a song, or hunting through a reel of tape, a customer could just choose a track and start singing.

The following year, in 1972, Inoue and his partners packaged the concept into their new device, the “8-Juke.” It included instantly selectable instrumental tracks in a more accessible key and tempo, a coin timer, microphone mixer, handwritten lyrics and, mercifully, reverb to massage some of the bad notes.

Competitors soon followed and by the mid-1970s even Japan’s major record labels were producing tracks for these karaoke machines. Now, at bars and clubs across Japan, more people were performing their favorite tunes. But at the same time, fewer musicians were needed to make it happen.

The Surprising Consequence

The word karaoke comes from the Japanese kara, meaning empty, and oke, short for okesutura, or orchestra. “Empty orchestra” was an appropriate name. The machine provided the accompaniment void of vocals and without the musicians on the stage or in the pit.

However, while the “empty orchestra” replaced some musicians, it dramatically expanded the number of people who could participate in music.

For one, it made performing easier. By changing the key and tempo of songs, a karaoke machine made them easier to sing. And the reverb provided an echo effect that blurred some mistakes, making the results slightly more tolerable for less-than-adoring fans in the room. The availability of lyrics also meant you didn’t have to memorize the song. And Inoue’s instant selection innovation kept the music moving.

Karaoke also made singing more accessible by transforming the performance spaces. One of the most striking additions in the 1980s was the karaoke boxes. They began as converted truck containers on the side of suburban roads. Inside was a private room, a karaoke machine, and enough seating for a group of friends. These were very different spaces from the bars and night clubs where alcohol boosted the confidence of businessmen to take the stage. In boxes, housewives, teenagers, families and elderly folks could all take a turn at the microphone.

Eventually, karaoke’s popularity began shaping the music itself. A song’s popularity no longer depended only on whether it was good to listen to, but also whether it was good to sing. Songs popular in karaoke boxes often appeared high on the charts. Labels began including karaoke versions on CD singles, and producers such as Tetsuya Komuro created songs with karaoke in mind.

Thanks to the karaoke phenomenon, audiences were no longer just consuming music, they were performing it and helping shape the music itself.

Participation Changes

Daisuke Inoue’s Crescent Juke karaoke machine certainly made his life easier but maybe not so much the lives of other musicians. Machines across Japan and eventually around the world would replace some of them in bars and night clubs. But the bigger picture wasn’t just substitution. Karaoke changed the role of the audience itself. People who had once been just listeners became performers.

Which raises an interesting question about artificial intelligence today.

We spend plenty of time asking what AI might do instead of musicians. But karaoke suggests another question worth asking: what exciting possibilities emerge when people who once only consumed music now gain new ways to participate in making it?

For some that may mean overcoming barriers of cost or technical skill. For others, it may mean creating despite physical limitations that now keep them from playing and performing the way they once could.

The karaoke machine reminds us that creative technology matters not only because it changes how art is made. It can change who gets to make it.

Sometimes the most important thing a new tool creates is not a song, but a new participant.

While he swept floors at Carden Distributors in New York City, Arthur Baker enjoyed listening to German electronic band, Kraftwerk. It gave him ideas for his side hustle as a music producer. He was working with a local DJ, Afrika Bambaataa, exploring a new sound blending the electronic music Baker loved with the emerging uptown dance and hip-hop world that Bam knew.

For the rhythm, they didn’t want a live drummer. They wanted something different, something more futuristic, and when they heard Roland’s new TR-808 drum machine, they’d found it. But there was a problem, they didn’t own an 808.

That’s when they saw the ad, a man with a drum machine. They called him in; his name was Joe and he wanted cash. That’s all we know. Oh, and he didn’t understand what Baker and Bam were looking for. So, they played him some Kraftwerk, he pulled something together, and they laid it down for the new track.

In June of 1982, Tommy Boy Records released the song, “Planet Rock.” It would change the course of music, in no small part because of its heartbeat, the Roland TR-808. But the drum machine didn’t actually sound like drums, and that was the secret. The 808 changed the world not because it replicated and replaced existing sounds, but because artists started treating it as something entirely new and different.

The Wrong Future

For several years, Roland had been making machines to provide rhythm accompaniment, such as the CR-78, designed for organists. In 1980, the TR-808 was the next step, a metal box with sixteen sounds intended to reproduce a drum kit and percussion. The problem: it didn’t sound like drums.

The Linn LM-1, on the other hand, also released in 1980, did sound like drums. You can hear it in many early 80s hits, including Prince’s “Purple Rain” and Michael Jackson’s “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin.”

The LM-1 sounded “real” because it used digitally recorded drum sounds. But that required a lot of memory, and this was 1980, so it was expensive. While an LM-1 cost more than $5,000, the 808 was just over $1,000 because it used analog technology. Instead of storing actual drum sounds, it synthesized approximations with transistors. The result was a suite of sounds doing really bad impersonations of drums, including a cowbell that sounds like a laser cannon warming up.

Unfortunately for Roland, most musicians were looking for realistic drum sounds like the LM-1. The 808 couldn’t deliver, and Roland discontinued it in 1983 with only 12,000 units produced.

The irony is that its commercial weakness, the synthetic analog sound, would soon become its greatest advantage. For one, the cheaper technology made it more accessible to emerging creators. But, perhaps more importantly, the analog approach gave artists more control over the sounds they could create by altering the decay, tuning, and other features. Instead of being chained to a recorded sound, you could manipulate what it produced. The flexibility offered an endless palette of creative possibilities.

So, thanks to its technology from the past, the TR-808 was soon to become a tool for mapping the future.

When Fake Became the Point

One of the early adopters was Greg Broussard, aka Egyptian Lover. He had grown up recording breakdowns from the radio to create mix tapes. After high school, he joined the popular Los Angeles music crew, Uncle Jamms Army. And as he looked for new sounds, he encountered Afrika Bambaataa’s, “Planet Rock.” When he met a close friend of Bambaataa’s, Afrika Islam, he immediately asked about the song’s rhythm and learned it was a drum machine called the TR-808.

Broussard was curious. He didn’t know what a drum machine even was. So he and Islam went immediately to the local Guitar Center. The salesman showed him how to program a beat, and Broussard re-created the sound of “Planet Rock.” He was sold, bought the 808, and went home to make something else entirely.

Immediately, he began using the 808 in his live performances with Uncle Jamms Army. He wasn’t recreating “Planet Rock” or a recorded drum sound; he was creating something totally new and totally his. He even used a rhythm pattern noise accidentally discovered when an engineer mistakenly plugged into the wrong output on the back of the machine.

The 808 became a foundation for his music, carrying hits like “Egypt, Egypt,” and he toured with four machines to cover all the songs he programmed. Along the way, he also spread the good news of the 808, teaching others to use it, like Luke Skyywalker (Luke Campbell), who would help embed it in the emerging Miami bass scene and 2 Live Crew.

Broussard and others were charting new pathways in music with the 808 because they stopped asking whether it sounded real and instead started leveraging its limitations for new possibilities. Its unnatural tones and flexibility offered an aggressive sound with an anti-establishment edge. Need proof? Just listen to how producer Rick Rubin extended the decay on the bass drum and placed it front and center in the Beastie Boys debut album “Licensed to Ill.” It’s less of a sound and more of a low-frequency event.

By the mid-80s, the 808’s strange sounds were no longer failed representations of acoustic instruments. They were the raw material for a new era in music, which continues today on albums like Kanye West’s “808s & Heartbreak,” which helped pioneer new subgenres including emo rap and experimental R&B.

Beyond Replacement

When new technologies impact the arts and creativity, we can be quick to judge them first by what they threaten to replace. Those concerns are legitimate and innovation always arrives with disruption in the passenger seat.

In the 1980s, drum machines could and did replace some drumming and session work. Perhaps as the old joke goes, what’s the difference between a drummer and a drum machine? You only have to punch the beat into the machine once.

But replacement is only part of the story.

The 808’s most important legacy wasn’t in its substitution for drummers but in its expansion of creative possibilities.

As artificial intelligence disrupts creativity and music, much of today’s debate centers on imitation, automation, compensation, and replacement. The 808 suggests that this may not be the whole ledger.

We don’t yet know what creators will discover through AI when they treat it not as a tool for replication but for exploration. But the lesson of the 808 suggests there are exciting tunes to come when we don’t confuse imitation with possibility.

But when the special aired on NBC two months later, forty-seven million viewers were talking about only one man.

Dressed in a fedora, a sequined jacket, a single white glove, and bedazzled socks, twenty-four-year-old Michael Jackson had followed a performance of the Jackson 5 for one of his new solo tunes, “Billie Jean.” Halfway through the track, he planted his toe, and appeared to glide backward effortlessly through space. The audience lost its collective mind over the instantly iconic moonwalk.

In the decades since, nearly every pop star on the planet has borrowed, adapted, or outright lifted Jackson’s dance routines. Which raises an uncomfortable question for modern intellectual property law: if a performer uses that slide on stage, do they owe the Jackson estate a royalty check?

Before you answer that, it’s worth asking a simpler question, were they even his moves to sell?

The moonwalk doesn’t have an author. No, it has a chain.

And following that chain backward lands you in the middle of a debate over artificial intelligence that many insist is simple, but which history reveals to be anything but.

The DNA of a Dance

In a 1903 silent film adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, several Black actors perform a dance known as the cakewalk. It originated on Southern plantations as an exaggerated “march and glide,” a subtle, subversive parody mocking the glamor and hubris of White high society. The movement was part of a genre known as “eccentric dancing” which included the “Virginia essence,” a slow and smooth shuffle that is the great-great-grandfather of the moon walk.

When Vaudeville exploded at the turn of the century, and was later adapted for the big screen, eccentric dancing moved from southern porches to big-city stages. By the 1930s, the essence of the cake walk and the moon walk was visible in the footwork of Earl “Snakehips” Tucker, Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, and jazz legend Cab Calloway.

By the 1940s, French mime Marcel Marceau was performing the slide in his famous “walking against the wind” routine. A decade later, Dick Van Dyke did a variation of it on “The Pat Boone Chevy Newsroom” in the 1950s. But the slide achieved pure, frictionless perfection in 1955, when dancer Bill Bailey executed a backward glide off the stage of the Apollo Theater.

During the Black Power movement of the 1960s and 70s, the dance returned to its roots of resistance and community in soul and funk. James Brown incorporated it into his kinetic performances, and the dancers on the incomparable Soul Train took it further. It was here that the dance groups, Eclipse and Electric Boogaloo, glided back and forth across the stage in the late 70s, incorporating the unmistakable moonwalk.

A few years later, as Michael Jackson prepared for his upcoming performance of Billie Jean for the Motown celebration, he sought out the Soul Train dancers that had been performing the backslide. He rehearsed the move and worried he wasn’t quite getting the feel of it. Nevertheless, as he incorporated it into his routine for that fateful evening, it would soon forever become associated with him.

When asked later how he created the move, Jackson credited the kids he saw dancing in the streets of Harlem in the late 70s. His instructors wished he had mentioned them, but either way, Jackson was citing a tradition instead of a moment of invention.

He was describing the ancient practice of creativity, a practice seen in the West African griot.

The Tradition of the Griot

Fifty years ago Alex Haley rocked the best-seller lists with his groundbreaking novel: Roots: The Saga of an American Family. It traces Haley’s ancestry, beginning with Kunta Kinte, who was captured in Africa and enslaved in 18th century America. Haley traced his roots to Kinte, he said, through the account of a griot in The Gambia. And for many in the west, this was the first they’d learned of griots.

In West Africa, a griot is an artisan of memory. A creator of stories, songs, and dance that shepherd the traditions from the past, through the present, and to the future. Commonly described as “praise-singers,” scholar Thomas Hale explains they are so much more: historian, genealogist, advisor, spokesperson, diplomat, interpreter, musician, composer, poet, and teacher.

That’s a lot of jobs, and none of them start from scratch.

The griot begins with inherited stories and gives them new expression for a particular time and audience. The creativity is in the transformation of the inheritance. It’s the act of absorbing what came before, refining it through a new voice, and handing it off to the next person in line. The goal isn’t to own the tradition, but to push it a little further forward.

That process makes the idea of a single creator, or owner, difficult to pin down. Where does the inheritance end and the new expression begin? And how much of what was handed down can one claim as theirs as they hand it to someone else?

Western law looks at a breakthrough performance, like the moonwalk, and instinctively reaches for a surveyor’s tape, eager to stake out a claim and write a property deed. The griot tradition looks at the same chain, plantation to vaudeville to Harlem to Soul Train to Pasadena, and sees creativity working exactly as intended, one iteration after another, carrying the traditions forward.

The Surveyors at the Gate

Today, record labels, publishers, and visual artists are suing over the unlicensed use of their work to train generative AI. Beneath those accusations sits a story we’ve grown accustomed to telling about creativity: an expression can, in fact, belong to a single author. And with that ownership, that author can make a claim on whatever someone else makes from it. Follow the influence, send a bill.

The moonwalk would like to have a word.

The challenge is that like the griot, every artist begins by ingesting inputs from the world around us. It’s phrasing from a record heard at age seven, a rhythm heard in the river flow, a step learned from a street dancer in Harlem. Then we process those patterns, and generate a new output.

That’s the underlying process we’ve taught machines to perform. The scale of AI is new and extraordinary, but the dependence on prior work is ancient.

And while the scale may change the consequences, it doesn’t change the nature of the process. Creativity requires the raw material of life. The more of these building blocks that we place behind a permission slip, the less room we leave for the creators who come next.

Michael Jackson absorbed over a century of American dance history, synthesized it in a rehearsal hall, and gave it back to more than forty-seven million people. If he’d been required to clear the underlying rights to the cakewalk, the Virginia essence, Marcel Marceau’s pantomime, and Bill Bailey’s Apollo routine, the moonwalk would still be stuck in legal purgatory.

Yet, this is the direction we’ve been traveling for well over a century. With every new legal extension, sample clearance rule, and statutory expansion, we have steadily built higher fences around the cultural commons. We have made the act of creating, especially for the kids without a legal retainer or studio budget, a little harder and a little more expensive.

The griot tradition understands that culture thrives when it is freely learned, remembered, and carried forward.

We used to understand that too. Now, whenever someone creates, our instinct isn’t to sit in awe, but to check the chain of title.

Cleveland “Clevie” Browne was hanging out at the Mixing Lab Recording Studio in Kingston, Jamaica, when something caught his eye. Always looking for interesting ways to “create new things,” he noticed a pair of timbale drums sitting in the corner.

He dragged them out, set them up, and asked his musical partner, Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson, to record while he “explored the studio space.”

The result felt right for a track they had been working on called “Fish Market.” Today it’s more commonly known as the “Dembow” riddim, and you can hear its heartbeat in at least 1,800 different songs. Seriously.

Because of that staggering ubiquity, Clevie and the estate of Steely, who died in Kingston in 2009, are currently suing a laundry list of global music icons, including Bad Bunny, Justin Bieber, and Pitbull, for copyright infringement. Every single one of them, the lawsuit claims, built a hit on top of Clevie’s old timbales.

In court, Bad Bunny’s lawyers contested the claim of ownership. They called the Dembow riddim a “Frankenstein,” a beat stitched together from different artists’ separate tracks over the years. No single song, they argued, actually contains all the elements that Clevie and Steely are trying to fence off as their property.

It’s a clever legal defense, but it accidentally forces a much more dangerous question about music and ownership, and what happens when you try to cram a vibrant culture into a 250-year-old legal filing cabinet.

The Riddim

If you aren’t that familiar with reggae and dancehall music, it helps to understand the phenomenon of the “riddim.”

A riddim is essentially a disembodied groove. It’s an instrumental accompaniment, typically built around a heavy drum and bass pattern. But it’s released as just that, an independent foundation. The entire point of a riddim is for others to build on top of it. So, a single riddim might serve as the sonic chassis for dozens of different vocal tracks, each released as its own song.

This communal approach to music making dates back to 1950s Jamaica, when the culture was rooted in outdoor sound systems rather than live bands. DJs would each spin the same tracks, and by the 1960s, they were shouting and toasting over them live. By the 1980s, this formula of a booming riddim paired with a fresh vocal overlay, had become a dominant form of Jamaican music. (It also migrated to the Bronx, where Jamaican immigrants like DJ Kool Herc used the same techniques to lay the foundation for global hip-hop.)

But, the crucial thing to understand is the autonomy of a riddim. Each was never meant to be a finished, walled-off product guarded by lawyers. It was an open-source seed meant to spawn a garden of variations.

And because Jamaica didn’t adopt formal copyright laws until 1993, this collaborative tradition evolved into a deeply entrenched way of life. So, when a fresh riddim would hit the streets in the 80s, it was grabbed, chopped, and adopted by countless artists, exactly as God and the DJs intended.

The Mutation

Clevie and Steely’s particular groove began its journey on the B-side of a 1990 track. It was a raw instrumental, driven by Clevie’s “old snare and kick drum,” layered with Steely’s synthesized flavor. And it was an instant hit, quickly licensed and laid down as the backbone for Shabba Ranks’ massive 1990 anthem, “Dem Bow.”

From there, the riddim became an unstoppable game of musical telephone.

It traveled to a studio in Long Island, where it was rebuilt by Jamaican musician Dennis “The Menace” Thompson. A Panamanian vocalist, Nando Boom, threw a Spanish translation over the top. Then, two NYC-based Jamaican DJs heard it, chopped it up, and recorded their own single over it, “Pounder.” And, they also released their instrumental version, the riddim, on the B-side.

This mutated form of the riddim was now in the wild. Throughout the 90s, it was chopped up and laid down in song after song. In fact, it was so foundational that the entire genre became known as Dembow.

Then, traveling on dubbed cassettes and scratched CDs, the Dembow riddim finally made its way to Puerto Rico, where it became the instrumental bedrock for roughly three-quarters of all reggaeton music.

By 2004, reggaeton was debuting at No. 1 on the top Latin albums chart with Daddy Yankee’s Barrio Fino. Humming behind it all was the Dembow riddim that began in Clevie and Steely’s studio. And today, it sits underneath the catalog of Bad Bunny, the most streamed male artist in history.

The Disparity

The riddim that Clevie and Steely built in 1989 seeded a genre that today is one of the most commercially successful musical traditions on earth. At the helm is Bad Bunny, a man who literally charters Airbus A380 super-jumbo jets for global stadium tours. And along the way, the three major labels have collected hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars from the riddims of reggaeton.

Meanwhile Clevie, now in his late 60s, watches it all happen from a distance.

His lawsuit is understandable. You certainly can’t blame a guy for wanting a piece of the empire he helped build. Steely’s estate and Clevie have named over 150 artists who they claim “never sought or obtained a license, authorization, or consent” to use their music. We own the riddim, they argue, so pay up.

The U.S. District Judge on the case, Andre Birotte, isn’t so sure. Faced with musicologists firing highly technical volleys back and forth, he denied a judgment and is instead sending the whole mess to a jury.

Soon, a dozen ordinary citizens, people who probably just wanted to get out of jury duty to go to Applebee’s, will be left to determine the ontological nature of a groove.

The Mismatch

The defense argues that the Dembow riddim is a “Frankenstein” work, a composite constructed from separate expressions over years of mutation. There is no distinct, singular expression to copyright, they claim.

As a legal argument it lands, but it also exposes a much deeper, structural incongruity.

As the legal scholar Olufunmilayo Arewa has documented, there is a profound bias at the heart of U.S. copyright law. Copyright was built for literature, not music. You can write literature down with precision. But with music, ink and paper are tragically inadequate. Certainly, you can depict the basic notes of the melody and harmony on sheet music, but that misses the timbre, groove, and performance. And it is precisely those elements that sit at the core of the African and African-diaspora musical traditions.

Compounding this, copyright crystallized during the Romantic era, when Western cultural elites were busy elevating classical music as the gold standard of authentic creativity. They sanctified the myth of individual genius and original expression, while vilifying “borrowing” as a lower art form.

The irony, of course, is that the classical tradition was built on borrowing. Bach did it frequently. Handel practically made it an Olympic sport. But, that history was sanitized, and borrowing became legally stigmatized as the stuff of “lower” music forms (blues, jazz, gospel, hip hop, reggae, dancehall). You know, the traditions built on borrowing as positive creativity and on performance and rhythm as originality.

So, while most of music is structurally communal, we are left with a copyright system obsessed with individual authorship and rooted in 18th century printed sheet music. It simply doesn’t fit.

Which brings us back to Frankenstein. The Dembow riddim is an assemblage because it was always meant to be an assemblage. It evolved through different hands, different studios, and different islands. Western copyright law primes us to hunt for a single author, but the riddim doesn’t have one. That’s not a flaw; that’s the design.

The Fence

None of this is Clevie’s fault. He built something truly remarkable, watched it spawn a billion-dollar global industry, and received almost nothing for it. His lawsuit is what justice looks like when the only instrument available is a giant, litigious fence.

But what would a legal victory actually mean?

It means that the next kid in Kingston, San Juan, or the Bronx who wants to build on the Dembow riddim, will have to pay up front. The raw materials of culture will only be available to those who can afford the licensing fees.

And so, the instrument of justice becomes an instrument of privilege and exclusion.

The jury hasn’t spoken yet. When they do, they won’t just decide who gets a royalty check for a groove recorded in 1989. They’ll decide whether there’s still a common space for emerging artists to explore, or if the gatekeepers have fenced off the beat.

But it wasn’t 2026. And the glasses weren’t Meta’s Ray-Bans. It was 1897, and they were a St. Louis inventor’s “X-ray spectacles” that claimed to see through solid objects. They landed in a moment when folks were already in a state of high anxiety thanks to a genuinely disruptive technology that had arrived just a few years earlier: the portable Kodak camera.

The Kodak had suddenly made anyone a photographer, shattering a sense of privacy that people had always taken for granted. Suddenly, it seemed like cameras were everywhere. But over time, society adjusted and the ubiquity of cameras became normal.

Until today.

Over a century later, the alarm bells are ringing again over invasive lenses. We didn’t ban the cameras then, and we shouldn’t now. And any legislative response demands extreme care, because history shows that when the government tries to save us from technology, it has a way of creating the opposite of what we wanted.

The Privacy Panic

Before 1888, photography required your cooperation. The equipment demanded a professional, a studio, and a subject willing to sit perfectly for five minutes without blinking, breathing, or smiling. Then George Eastman, a former bank clerk from Rochester, N.Y., handed a wooden box to anyone with $25. His Kodak No. 1 camera came pre-loaded with 100 exposures and a promise on every advertisement: You press the button, we do the rest.

Suddenly, anyone could be a photographer, and a new social menace materialized on boardwalks and public streets: the “Kodak fiend.”

These supposed “deviants” were simply everyday people eagerly snapping photos, which often included unsuspecting subjects. Encouraging this craze were newspaper editors, who began paying double for candid celebrity shots, along with advertising agencies who began including images into promotions. Overnight, no one was safe from being captured and plastered across town.

The lawsuits followed. An opera star sought an injunction after advertisers circulated a candid photo of her in tights. A widow went to court to stop a cigar brand from using her late husband’s face. A physician sued over a throat tonic that borrowed his endorsement without asking.

But the law wasn’t prepared to respond. The courts were still living in Benjamin Franklin’s era, when a famous face was civic property and nobody sued over a dinner plate bearing their likeness.

So, one aggrieved lawyer proposed a new solution.

Samuel Warren had married into a high-society media circus and was exhausted by the uninvited cameras ruining his dinner parties. Enlisting a future Supreme Court justice, Louis Brandeis, they published “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review in 1890.

In one of the most consequential legal articles ever written, they constructed a framework to address this novel harm: not theft, not defamation, but an injury to the private self, to what they called the “inviolate personality.”

But over time, people grew accustomed to the cameras, the law shifted, and the panic passed.

The Return of the Lens

As it turned out, the Kodak fiend didn’t ruin society, as some had feared. He just became most of us, casually documenting our lunches, our children, our sunsets, and the occasional unsuspecting stranger. In fact, today more than two trillion photographs are taken in a single year, roughly 1.8 trillion of which are our cats sleeping. And we do it all with a device more powerful and inconspicuous than anyone in the 1890s could have ever imagined.

But something has people smashing cameras again. Not the ubiquitous iPhones or Ring doorbells. Instead, activists are targeting solar-powered boxes made by an Atlanta company called Flock Safety. These devices have been spray-painted, taped over, and destroyed. Congress is even considering cutting federal funding to agencies that use them.

And they aren’t the only cameras under siege.

Meta’s smart glasses are receiving similar attention. Critics have dubbed them “pervert glasses,” while Senators have written sternly worded letters to Mark Zuckerberg, and more than seventy-five civil liberties organizations have signed warnings. An activist group called, “Everyone Hates Elon” even posted protest posters over Meta’s Kylie Jenner ads for the new spectacles, which feels like mission creep, considering Elon Musk has nothing to do with them.

It sounds a lot like the 1890s. A new camera has raised the stakes on privacy. Now, someone can record you without the universal warning sign to which we have grown accustomed: a person holding a glowing rectangle directly in front of their face. Though, if we’re honest, with modern zoom capabilities, someone could be filming your nostrils right now, and you wound’t know it.

Regardless, we can take comfort in knowing that existing harassment and voyeurism laws still apply. And, as before, society will develop the necessary norms and etiquette to manage the threat.

However, there is something new stoking the modern outrage. With Flock and Meta, it’s not just the camera; it’s what the camera feeds.

It’s More Than a Camera

In October 2024, Kashif Hoda was waiting for a train at Harvard Square when a young man in thick-framed glasses asked him for directions. A few minutes later, the same guy approached again. “Do you happen to be the person working on minority stuff for Muslims in India?,” he asked.

Hoda was surprised. How did a complete stranger know that?

The young man was AnhPhu Nguyen, a Harvard junior. He and his classmate, Caine Ardayfio, had developed a system they called “I-XRAY.” It fed images from the Meta glasses into a public facial recognition service PimEyes, and then ran the results through a large language model to excavate personal information.

They had basically built a working version of the X-ray glasses the newspaper warned about in 1897. Sure, they couldn’t see through a person’s clothes, but they could certainly see through their anonymity.

These glasses, like today’s Flock cameras and Meta smart glasses, feed an instant identification system that obliterates the old norms of public privacy. Flock cameras don’t just capture a passing moment; they build permanent dossiers by reading license plates, tagging timestamps, and uploading everything to a massive, searchable national database. Similarly, recent reports that Meta has quietly embedded unreleased facial-recognition code, known as NameTag, into its smart glasses app supercharges what these lenses can do.

But banning the hardware misses the point. As Nguyen pointed out to Forbes, the glasses themselves are almost irrelevant. “This could be done with any regular phone camera and still do the same amount of damage,” he explained.

The Legal Mutation

When confronted with a new, alarming technology, our instinct is often to ban the tool. But outlawing smart glasses would be a mistake. It risks sacrificing a technology that holds the promise of immense human benefit, from real-time language translation and life-changing accessibility for the visually and cognitively impaired.

Furthermore, top-down regulatory “fixes” have a notorious history of missing the actual target and creating unintended consequences.

Consider Warren and Brandeis. In 1890, their instinct was to build a legal shield to protect human dignity from cameras. They wanted to keep your likeness out of the marketplace.

But as that grand intention ground its way through the gears of the legal system, it mutated into precisely the opposite. It became the modern “right of publicity,” which explicitly treats your face as a commercial asset to be bought, licensed, and sold to the highest bidder. By the time the ELVIS Act passed in Tennessee, the legislation bearing the spirit of Warren and Brandeis wasn’t protecting Elvis’ privacy and dignity. It was protecting the bank account of whoever held the licensing rights to his “inviolate personality.”

They aimed at the right thing, and still ended up somewhere they never intended.

The Student Solution

That’s the regulatory trap we face today. If lawmakers rush to ban the frames, they will stifle the benefits that the technology can provide, all while aiming at the wrong target. It’s not the glasses that threaten our privacy norms, it’s the underlying infrastructure, which can be hooked up to any camera on earth.

Instead of looking to Warren and Brandeis for a top-down legal fix, we should look to those two Harvard students.

They built I-XRAY to raise awareness, pairing it with a comprehensive guide to equip everyday folks on how to opt-out and remove themselves from the databases that made the system possible.

They understood that the camera is already out of the box. Their solution was bottom-up: raising awareness, equipping users with technological self-defense, and helping society develop new norms for a new frontier.

That might not be a complete answer. But it’s the right kind of answer.

Sousa had every reason to be confident. He was fifty-two, the composer of “The Stars and Stripes Forever,” and the owner of a mustache that could safely harbor a family of songbirds through a harsh winter. The committee leaned forward, eager to hear from the most famous bandleader in the world, as the air filled with the smell of pipe smoke and the damp wool of senators in a sweltering summer.

Sousa told them that the country was facing an emergency. The player piano and the phonograph were producing a generation of passive consumers who would no longer sing, no longer play, no longer gather around the parlor piano on Sunday evenings. The human vocal cord, he warned, would atrophy. Amateur musicians would vanish, and take their teachers with them.

Three months later he would publish a version of this argument in Appleton’s Magazine, under the title, “The Menace of Mechanical Music.”

It was a moving performance, and it was also a masterpiece in lobbying.

Because by the time Sousa sat before Congress in 1906 to warn of these machines, he had been recording his marches on them with Columbia, Berliner, and Victor for sixteen years. He was hardly the luddite, smashing these infernal devices that threatened all he held dear. Instead, he had embraced them.

Perhaps, Sousa’s Congressional quest wasn’t actually about a cease and desist as much as it was about getting a piece of the action.

The Performance

The Appleton’s article, when it ran that September, was ten pages long and adorned with clever cartoons. Throughout it, Sousa explained that mechanical reproduction would “reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things….” Phonographs would usher children to sleep instead of their mother’s songs. Romantics would serenade their lovers with recordings. The parlor piano, a nineteenth century ideal of family togetherness, would fall silent. Like the English sparrow, he warned, these machines would appear innocent but reap “destruction.”

While it was a passionate and persuasive argument, it was wrong. Census data from 1890 to 1910 reveals the number of music teachers actually increased per capita during these years. It seems more people wanted to participate in music, not fewer. So, the mustachioed prophet wasn’t right, but perhaps he wasn’t actually a believer himself. Perhaps he had other intentions behind the pitch.

American copyright law in 1906 did not recognize a composer’s right of ownership when their work was reproduced mechanically, only when it was printed on paper. So, while Sousa’s songs were being pressed onto cylinders and piano rolls across the country, he wasn’t reaping the financial rewards. He wanted to change that, to change copyright. But he had learned, through earlier lobbying efforts alongside music publishers in Europe, that nobody would rally around his financial woes. People would, however, rally around a moral cause.

So, he crafted his arguments about the existential threat these new technologies posed to musical culture in America and went before Congress multiple times. He arose as a champion of the new Copyright Act, which passed in 1909 and created the first compulsory mechanical license: two cents per copy to the rights owner

.

The Moral Shield

Sousa was not alone in this strategy. Throughout history, when a new technology threatens an existing creative economy, the folks most threatened rarely say “my wallet is at stake.” They say, “the soul of the art form is at stake.” They take up the moral argument as a shield to protect their financial interests. Certainly it’s not entirely a ruse. Sousa did love music and had reasonable concerns. As I explored in an earlier essay, Filippo de Strata, the 15th century scribe who begged Venice to ban the printing press, probably did truly worry about the effects on kids. The concern isn’t wholly manufactured, but it is strategically deployed.

So, how can we know the real motives behind the shield? Perhaps the revealing question is, what solution would they accept?

Sousa didn’t actually want mechanical music banned. What he accepted was a pay day, a royalty. Once the money followed his music, the civilizational crisis quietly faded away. That says a lot about where his concerns really lived.

Same Argument, New Machine

In the summer of 2024, the major record labels, Universal Music Group, Sony, and Warner filed coordinated lawsuits against AI music companies Suno and Udio. The legal argument was that training on copyrighted recordings without a license constituted infringement. The moral framing, however, was far more apocalyptic: AI threatens working artists and undermines the soul of creativity.

Some of that moral shield is undoubtedly sincere. But the diagnostic question is the one Sousa’s career answers. What solution would the labels accept?

The early signs are not “shut the technology down” to protect human artistry. Instead, it’s a partnership. The labels have moved from litigation to licensing deals with the companies they sued. They want an architecture that routes AI music through their existing industry infrastructure. That sounds more like continued control over artists than it does compensation and justice for artists.

Sousa certainly got compensated. He went on to cash big checks from his compositions, performances, and recording. He toured the world with his band until the end. And when he died in 1932, the morning after conducting a rehearsal (which is the way to go), he was one of the wealthiest musicians in America. And the music that he had warned would be eviscerated by the mechanical armies played on without him, while his descendants got paid.

So, the next time you meet the ghost of Sousa in a story or a social media post, warning that a new technology is the menace of music, it’s worth asking the question that Sousa’s story answers:

What solution would they accept?

Sousa’s ghost knows the answer. He’ll quote you a rate.

That may tell you more than the argument.

The man mentioned he had heard a rumor that Nast would soon be departing for Europe to study art. Nast replied that the idea was absurd; he was busier than ever drawing cartoons for Harper’s Weekly and couldn’t possibly afford to step away.

Ah, the visitor countered, but perhaps he could afford it. In fact, Nast could receive a hundred thousand dollars if he simply took a trip.

Nast played along. What about two hundred thousand?

Certainly.

What about half a million?

Absolutely, the visitor assured him. Half a million dollars in gold, just to get on a boat and stop drawing.

Nast declined. He was determined to stay, “to put some of those fellows behind the bars…”

The “fellows” were the infamous William M. “Boss” Tweed and his associates, the officials that ran New York City. The visitor was a representative from the Broadway Bank, delivering a not so subtle bribe on their behalf.

Nast had spent the better part of a year rendering Tweed in Harper’s Weekly as a vulture, a bloated plutocrat, and a moneybag. And the cartoons were working, steadily loosening the boss’s grip on the city.

Tweed was ready to do anything to stop “them damned pictures.” But he couldn’t because Thomas Nast didn’t need Boss Tweed’s permission to draw him.

Today, a century and a half later, the powerful haven’t stopped fighting the unauthorized use of their image. They’ve just found a much more elegant solution than putting someone on a boat.

The Cartoonist and the Moneybag

To understand why Boss Tweed was willing to spend half a million dollars, roughly thirteen million dollars today, to silence a single cartoonist, it helps to understand what was at stake.

William H. Tweed had spent nearly two decades in public office assembling total control over New York City. By 1870 his political machine, the infamous “Tweed Ring,” was a marvel of municipal extortion, casually siphoning millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars’ through rigged contracts, orchestrated elections, and brazen bribery.

And he wore his new found wealth, albeit stolen, on his chest, sporting an enormous diamond stickpin in his tie. Reformers were furious, but they couldn’t prove any wrong doing, and he remained a hero to much of the working class city.

Then he met a guy with a pen.

Thomas Nast had joined the staff of Harper’s Weekly in 1862 to sketch the bloody frontlines of the Civil War. With the war over, he turned his pen toward the municipal bloodletting in Manhattan. In 1870, he poured out everything he had on the Ring with the approaching gubernatorial election. He churned out up to seven drawings a week, each rendering Tweed’s machine as a grotesque syndicate picking the city’s bones clean. (He was so successful that The New York Times and Mark Twain gladly joined his crusade.)

Where thousands of words of journalism had failed, images triumphed. Nast’s cartoons bypassed the brain and hit the public right in the gut. Tweed could feel the tide turning, and he knew exactly why.

“I don’t care a straw for your newspaper articles,” Tweed famously barked at a reporter. “My constituents don’t know how to read, but they can’t help seeing them damned pictures.”

He was right. They did see the pictures, and in 1873, Boss Tweed went to jail.

The cartoons worked because they looked like Tweed, and Nast could not be stopped. There was no “right of publicity” for Tweed to wield to control the use of his likeness. Nast didn’t need his permission to mock him.

Get in the Zone

Today, the issue has taken on a new algorithmic shape.

Generative AI can clone your face and voice in a matter of minutes, if not seconds. A realistic video of a politician or celebrity saying something they never actually said can be produced by anyone with a laptop. Understandably, many are worried, and Congress, in response, is considering the NO FAKES Act, a federal right of publicity giving individuals sweeping legal control over their likeness.

This is where it gets interesting.

The proposed law includes a specific exemption for satire and commentary, to protect the Thomas Nasts of the world. After all, parody is a critical instrument in the tool box of a republic. There’s a reason that a unanimous Supreme Court in 1988 cited Thomas Nast as a prime example of why the First Amendment’s right to free expression must be safeguarded.

As Chief Justice William Rehnquist wrote, Nast was “probably the greatest American cartoonist to date,” and his relentless assault on Tweed was a critical part of the “political discourse” necessary to expose corruption. A free people must be free to criticise the powerful.

The NO FAKES Act acknowledges this, which is why it has the exemption.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that a legal exemption is merely a zone, and you have to know exactly where the boundary lines are to know if you’re safely inside it. That’s not a problem if the legal lines are brightly painted. But three decades ago, a robot in a wig erased the clarity.

The Robot in the Wig

In 1992, Samsung ran an advertisement about the future, featuring a robot in a blond wig and an evening gown standing next to a giant letter board. To be clear, the robot was not Vanna White, and there were no statements suggesting that it was. The ad was just a humorous, sci-fi forecast that Wheel of Fortune would still be running in 2012, long after the human hosts were replaced by automation.

Vanna White sued, and a federal appeals court ruled in her favor. California law protected White’s right of publicity, and while Samsung had not used the traditional markers of her likeness: her name, face, or voice, the court ruled that Samsung had “created a likelihood of confusion” through “appropriating her identity.”

This was a massive extension of the right of publicity, to now include anything that simply reminded the public of a celebrity.

The boundary lines of parody were fading.

A dissenting judge named Alex Kozinski warned that this decision was “creating a new and much broader property right, a right unknown in California law.” This new right handed public figures the power to prevent others from even evoking their image in the public’s mind. It went far beyond restricting the expression of an idea. It was the authority for one person to cancel anyone’s freedom to mock them.

As Kozinski bluntly summarized, “That’s a speech restriction unparalleled in First Amendment law.”

Thanks to Vanna White, it’s less clear to the Thomas Nast’s of the world if their evocation of someone’s likeness is legally protected satire or illegal property theft. If you draw a cartoon to call to the viewer’s mind a specific political boss, is it legal? You can’t be sure.

And that uncertainty means you have to hire lawyers. But a lawyer can only give you an educated guess. If you really want to know where the boundary line is, you have to go to court. And that can cost you a fortune.

Today, Boss Tweed wouldn’t have to win a right of publicity case against Thomas Nast. He would just need the financial math of the litigation to ruin him. We know Tweed didn’t lack the money, he just lacked the legal standing to drag Nast through a decade of lawsuits.

The NO FAKES Act would hand him that standing.

The Wall and the Door

None of this means that AI-generated fakes are not a real problem. The question is whether the remedy preserves the critical freedoms of the First Amendment, or quietly dismantles them.

Thomas Nast didn’t need a legal “safe harbor.” He didn’t need a team of lawyers. Because he had a wall, an absolute freedom to draw the powerful without their permission.

The NO FAKES ACT replaces that wall with a door. And every door has a gatekeeper, and unfortunately the gatekeeper usually favors the person with the most money and power.

In 1871, Boss Tweed’s banker had to offer a half million dollars in gold to try and get a cartoonist on a boat.

The modern version doesn’t require that much gold or creativity. It just needs to file a lawsuit.

Somewhere in upstate New York, a teenage girl slammed her bedroom door behind her and sat alone.

This was not all that unusual. Teenagers have been avoiding the world in their bedrooms since doors were invented. But Abigail Roberson’s misery was different from the ordinary varieties of adolescent angst. She had, without warning and without her consent, become famous.

It wasn’t because she had accomplished anything particularly noteworthy or even sought the public attention. The Franklin Mills Company had simply gotten hold of her photograph and printed it on twenty-five thousand posters, which they then distributed to stores, warehouses, and saloons across the state, and apparently, much of the country. Above her face, in large plain letters: Flour of the Family. Below it: Franklin Mills Flour.

She had not been asked. She had not been paid. She had not been told.

When she discovered it, she suffered a nervous shock and was confined to her bed. In fact, it got so bad, her parents even called a doctor to help.

And that’s how, in 1902, Abigail Roberson, still a minor, found herself in court suing the Franklin Mills Company and the Rochester Folding Box Company for fifteen thousand dollars and an injunction. She wanted her face back. She wanted, in the language Warren and Brandeis had given the world just twelve years earlier, “the right to be let alone.”

Seven judges on the New York court of appeals heard the case of this young woman made sick by the commercialization of her image.

She lost, four to three.

The Legislature

The four judges who ruled against Abigail were not, to their credit, indifferent to her suffering. Chief Judge Parker, writing for the majority, acknowledged the wrong. He noted that Franklin Mills had acted with “impertinence,” and the use of her image was distasteful.

But, there was no right to privacy in the law. Yes, in 1890 Warren and Brandeis had proposed it, but no one had enacted it. If New York wanted to protect women from appearing on flour bags without consent, the legislature would have to take up the cause. Judge Parker even recommended that they do so, emphasizing that “no one should be permitted for his own selfish purpose to use the picture or the name of another for advertising purposes without his consent.”

And the dissent agreed. Written by Judge Gray, it highlighted how photography had made possible “an act of invasion of the individual’s privacy” that was “possibly more formidable and more painful in its consequences, than an actual bodily assault might be.” And he was joined by a chorus of outrage across the state as news spread that Roberson was defenseless against the invasion of her privacy.

The New York legislature responded immediately, passing Sections 50 and 51 of the Civil Rights Law in 1903. It was the first right of privacy statute in American history, and it prohibited the use of any living person’s name, portrait, picture, or voice for advertising purposes or purposes of trade without written consent. It seemed like a win for Roberson and others, but it was not what Warren and Brandeis had envisioned.

They had proposed a personal right to protect you from the injury that exposure inflicted on you as a person. It violated your inner self, disturbed your peace, invaded your personality. But how do you measure that injury? The law’s answer was commercial. It measured the wrong by if it was used “for advertising purposes or purposes of trade.” In other words, your image is protected because it has commercial value, not because it has dignity.

This was the big shift. Warren and Brandeis had argued that your face is not a commodity, it’s outside of the ownership framework entirely. The 1903 law now stated that your face is a commodity, and it requires your consent.

The Bubblegum Case

Nobody pulled on that thread for fifty years. Then in 1953, two chewing gum companies got into a fight over trading cards.

Haelan Laboratories and Topps Chewing Gum were competitors in the baseball card business, and both had obtained licenses from the same players to use their photographs on their cards. But Haelean believed their right was exclusive, and Topps disagreed. The players whose faces were of dispute were not even involved in the lawsuit. It was just a disagreement over contracts. Yet, the Judge, Jerome Frank, with just a few sentences made it much more than that.

Frank acknowledged that the ball players had existing privacy rights, but also noted that a person has “a right in the publicity value of his photograph.” He didn’t offer legal precedents or expositions on common law to defend this assertion. Instead he explained that celebrities would “feel sorely deprived” if they didn’t get paid for the use of their face. It was a purely economic argument for a new right.

The next year, a lawyer named Melville Nimmer seized on this new opportunity. As legal counsel to Paramount Pictures, he recognized the opportunity before the industry. In a law review article, he took Frank’s statements and built something entirely new with them. Celebrities, he argued, deserved a full commercial property right. He called it the “needs of Broadway and Hollywood.” Transferable. Descendible. Assignable. Because they had worked hard to become famous, they should be able to cash in on it with an asset that could be licensed, sold, and inherited like any other.

The 1903 statute had placed your face in the marketplace with the right to deny its use. Nimmer had now written the deed.

The Deed

Elvis Presley died in 1977. In 2024, the state of Tennessee passed the ELVIS Act, the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act, to protect artists from artificial intelligence tools that replicate their voices and likenesses without consent. It was named for the King, and it was framed as protecting artists.

But AI cannot harm Elvis. He can’t be embarrassed. He can’t benefit from the protection. He can’t even object to the use of his voice or face. However, the Authentic Brands Group can, because they own the rights to his likeness, along with Marilyn Monroe, Muhammad Ali and a portfolio of deceased celebrities generating hundreds of millions of dollars each year.

The ELVIS Act doesn’t protect Elvis. It protects whoever holds the deed to Elvis.

Abigail Roberson didn’t want anyone to own her face. She wanted, as Warren and Brandeis had sought, the right to be let alone. Instead, what the law gave her, and has been building ever since, is a marketplace. A marketplace where your face has value, where that value can be owned, and where the owner is not always you.

She wanted her face back. The law that grew from her suffering gave someone else the right to buy it.

The press, however, was aglow with details about the bride, her father (a U.S. Senator and future Secretary of State), the wedding party, the ceremony, and the reception. In fact, reporters had been covering the events leading up to this momentous occasion for months, and they would continue to aggressively chronicle the couple’s private life for years to come.

Eventually the groom, Samuel D. Warren, grew utterly exhausted with the relentless coverage and the incessant invasion of his privacy. So, he did what all good, aggrieved lawyers would do in such a predicament, he wrote an article for the Harvard Law Review.

That 1883 wedding, and the essay it ultimately provoked, would dramatically change the course of American legal history. It stands as a foundation on which debates today unfold over what it means to have rights to your identity.

The Right to Be Let Alone

Published in 1890, “The Right to Privacy” remains one of the most famous legal articles ever written. Driven by sheer, aristocratic annoyance, Samuel Warren had enlisted the assistance of fellow Boston-lawyer and future Supreme Court Justice, Louis Brandeis, to address a new assault on modern humanity. Together, they drafted architectural plans for a brand-new legal doctrine they called, “the right to be let alone.”

The problem was that the existing legal framework only protected you from lies. If a newspaper published a false rumor, you could sue for defamation. But if a “Kodak fiend” snapped your photo and published it in the rapidly growing press, you were out of luck. They hadn’t stolen or copied your property, and they hadn’t lied about your reputation. They had just harvested your private life for public consumption. And as Warren and Brandeis explained, that was a severe personal injury:

The intensity and complexity of life, attendant upon advancing civilization, have rendered necessary some retreat from the world, and man, under the refining influence of culture, has become more sensitive to publicity, so that solitude and privacy have become more essential to the individual; but modern enterprise and invention have, through invasions upon his privacy, subjected him to mental pain and distress, far greater than could be inflicted by mere bodily injury.

Their thesis was revolutionary: these new invasions of privacy were an assault upon a person’s fundamental rights. In a chaotic modernizing world, that private oasis, that peace of mind, was more necessary than ever for an enjoyable life. Therefore, Warren and Brandeis argued, the law required an urgent update to guard your rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Unlike the Founders, who treated their famous faces as civic assets, Warren wasn’t protecting a public image, he was protecting a private self. He and Brandeis were insisting that a new human right be legally recognized, a right to protect your inner self from being exposed and exploited in the media market.

The Kodak That Runs on Algorithms

Fast forward to 2026, and we are facing a similar technological disruption, with a similar effort to protect your rights. But the proposed solution is very different.

Generative artificial intelligence is the new Kodak. It can clone your face and your voice without your knowledge, without your consent, and within a matter of seconds.

Like Warren and Brandeis over 135 years ago, many are worried about what this means for your ability to protect against the unauthorized fabrication and distribution of, well, you. Today, the legal response in Congress is to champion the recently revised NO FAKES Act (a deeply tortured acronym for the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act.) It’s a federal approach modeled on the recently adopted Tennessee law, the Ensuring Likeness, Voice, and Image Security Act, or ELVIS Act.

Ostensibly, these bills are twenty-first century updates to Warren and Brandeis. They’re shields to protect not just your privacy but the unauthorized replication of your identity. But, there is a glaring difference. As legal scholar Jennifer Rothman notes, such modern legislative efforts tend to abandon Warren’s concept of personal privacy rights in favor of constructing broad, transferable property rights. They legally transform your likeness and your voice into a thing that can be owned.

Warren’s and Brandeis’ project was to create a new legal principle of protection specifically because your identity isn’t property. As they explained it, your “personal writings and all other personal production” cannot be classified as property “unless that word be used in an extended and unusual sense.” They proposed a right to privacy, instead of a right to property, because they believed that human identity sits outside of the ownership framework entirely.

They wanted to shield you from being treated as property. These new legal remedies actually constitute the self as property.

Who Owns Who?

Marilyn Monroe famously said, “I restore myself when I’m alone.” Like Samuel Warren, she deeply understood the value of privacy and the desperate need for a retreat from the cameras.

But the law didn’t give Marilyn Monroe a shield to protect her inner self. Instead, it gave her a transferable property right. It turned her identity into a commodity.

Because of that shift, today Monroe isn’t a person, she’s a corporate portfolio. The Authentic Brands Group, a licensing conglomerate, owns the rights to her face and voice, raking in around $80 million dollars each year for them.

Maybe Samuel Warren would smile knowing that a legal mechanism exists to protect a person from exposure. But perhaps he would frown realizing that identity has become a tradeable asset, and the consent required doesn’t have to be your own. Anyone with enough capital can simply buy the deed.

So, how did American law move from protecting the human soul to licensing it? It started with a flour girl from upstate New York. We’ll catch up with her next time.

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So, a low profile was in order.

But that was impossible.

He was, by most accounts, “the most famous American in the world.” As he walked the streets of Paris, crowds gathered. His face was painted on dishes, etched into clocks, glazed onto vases, and stitched on clothing. As he wrote to his daughter, “your father’s face [is] as well known as the moon.”

And it was all done without his permission. He was furious. Just kidding, he found it amusing. He joked that with dolls of him scattered across the country, he could “truly be said… to be i-doll-ized.”

He didn’t sue anyone. He didn’t even threaten to sue anyone. The very idea of owning his face would have struck him as bizarre.

So, Benjamin Franklin, Ambassador to France, just laughed it off.

The Republic of Faces

Franklin wasn’t unusual. (Well certainly in his fur cap he was a bit eccentric, and it was odd that his face was painted on the inside of a chamber pot, a passive-aggressive gift from King Louis XVI to a courtier who was a little too smitten with the American.) But Franklin was entirely ordinary in his indifference to the use of his likeness.

Josiah Wedgewood took full advantage. He sold thousands of medallions bearing the faces of his “Illustrious Moderns:” Voltaire, Rousseau, Newton, and Franklin himself. By 1779, these “baubles” were outselling the elegant tea sets that made Wedgewood rich. Other entrepreneurs joined in, peddling pitchers, plates, fans, perfume bottles, and household goods adorned with the names and faces of the famous. And all of it without a licensing agreement.

The Founders didn’t just tolerate this; they celebrated it. Their faces were a kind of republican asset, belonging to the public as an instrument for building the new nation. And their fame was a sign of achievement, not an income stream.

That’s a tricky concept to grasp in today’s culture, where the Zsa Zsa factor dominates. Today, people become famous simply for being famous and then they monetize the attention. But Samuel Adams didn’t become well-known for an outrageous lifestyle and then launch a fragrance line. (“Rebellion,” for the man who prefers his tea served cold, salty, and by the crate.) No, back then, celebrity was recognition of accomplishment and civic virtue.

And this wasn’t just a Revolutionary-era quirk. Throughout the nineteenth century there were no lawsuits over cigar boxes bearing the faces of every president from Lincoln to Cleveland. There was no litigation over photographs of John Brown or Freckle Cure advertisements featuring Oscar Wilde. The social historian Neil Harris, surveying it all, concluded that “some unspoken assumption made famous people…a species of common property whose commodity exploitation required little control.”

Then, at the end of the nineteenth century, a wooden box from Rochester ruined the vibe.

Enter the Fiends

George Eastman’s Kodak camera, which we explored last time, revolutionized photography. Before 1888, taking a photograph required heavy equipment, volatile chemicals, and specialized expertise. Photos were rare, formal, and almost always consensual. After 1888, they were none of those things.

Meanwhile, there was a new, commercial demand for images. The industrial revolution was creating a surplus of goods, and advertisers were discovering that pictures stopped the eye in ways that dense columns of text never could. And journalism was racing in the same direction. Daily newspaper circulation jumped from 2.6 million in 1870 to 8.4 million in 1890, and the new sensationalist press competed ferociously for readers by using images. Editors began paying double for candid, unposed photos of unsuspecting celebrities. The paparazzi had arrived.

Here was the new challenge. Before the Kodak, you generally knew if someone was taking your picture. The equipment practically announced itself. But now, a stranger on the beach could capture your face without your knowledge, and with the insatiable demand for photos, you might wake up to find it in the local paper or on a shelf at the corner pharmacy. Many quickly grew weary of the exposure, dubbing these rogue photographers, “Kodak fiends.” One observer even warned that they were “ in league with some evil spirit.”

The lawsuits followed. In 1890, opera star Marion Manola sought an injunction after advertisers circulated a candid photo of her in tights to promote a play. Sir Morrell Mackenzie sued over a throat elixir that borrowed his endorsement without asking. Colonel John Atkinson’s widow went to court to stop the use of her late husband’s name and likeness on a cigar brand. The thread running through each: a face used commercially, without permission, in a culture that had just made that trivially easy to do.

And the courts didn’t have a consistent response. The camera had transformed American culture, while the law was still rooted in Benjamin Franklin’s era.

So, one Boston lawyer decided he’d had enough. He had married into a high-society media circus and was sick of the uninvited cameras. Partnering with a future Supreme Court justice, he set out to build a new legal remedy, a right to privacy. We’ll get there next time.

Stone Tablets and Duct Tape

Today, A.I. has us grappling once again with who owns faces and voices. Many proponents of stronger protections reach for the language of fundamental rights, inherent protections, and natural claims, as though the answer is obvious. But it isn’t.

These rights were built in response to a specific technology, at a specific moment, by specific people with specific grievances. The Kodak created a social friction that the law wasn’t prepared to handle. It would take years of lawsuits, a landmark law review article, a sympathetic “flour girl,” and a legislative uprising to construct the privacy framework we have today.

Now, a new technology has arrived once again, and many feel the existing legal framework is insufficient to manage it. But as we draft new iterations, it pays to look closely at how our current foundation was poured. We’ll dig into that story next time.

Many folks were not pleased. One music blog led its coverage with a sneering “Wah-hawww, this isn’t good” and concluded with a single word: “Gross!”

This reaction isn’t new. Journey back to the days when photography was so difficult that people who were arrested would sometimes buy their mugshots, just to have a selfie.

That was 1888. Then everything changed when a former bank clerk, George Eastman, introduced a wooden box the size of a loaf of bread. He called it the Kodak, and the establishment called it: unacceptable.

Everyone a Photographer

Prior to the twentieth century, taking pictures was hard. You had to mix chemicals, adjust lots of settings, work with a glass plate, print positive paper copy, and on and on. You needed a professional.

As an amateur, Eastman was frustrated. So, by 1885 he had created a revolutionary flexible roll of film to replace the cumbersome glass plates. He also began a mail-in-service that developed your finished roll into prints. But there was a problem. Photographers were an old-school bunch, and they wouldn’t switch from the plates to his film.

So, Eastman decided that “in order to make a large business we would have to reach the general public and create a new class of patrons.” He was going to take photography from the professionals and hand it to every vacationing dentist and bored aunt in America. And with the Kodak No. 1, in 1888, that’s exactly what he did.

The camera sold for $25, and Eastman promoted it with a slogan that still sounds like the future: “You press the button, we do the rest.” All you had to do was just mail the entire Kodak camera back to the Eastman Dry Plate and Film Company, and they returned your prints.

Imagine the transformation: at the turn of the century, the average middle class family owned maybe 10 photos, total. Now they had 100 photo opportunities in their hands. It caught on quickly, and by 1899, the New York Tribune reported that “[a]mateur photography is rapidly approaching, if it has not already reached, the dignity of a ‘craze.’” And it only grew. The next year, Eastman introduced the “Brownie” camera with 6 exposures for the cost of $1. He sold over 150,000 of them in the first year.

Photography had gone mainstream, and the establishment naturally didn’t approve.

Camera Fiends: Act 1

In the 1890s, Alfred Stieglitz was Manhattan’s most serious photographer, and Eastman’s Kodak had just made his life very, very complicated. If anyone could just press a button and create a photo, could photography really be an art form?

Stieglitz was convinced it could be, because authentic photography was hard. He explained in Scribner’s Magazine in 1899, that developing a photo plate “requires a knowledge of and feeling for the comprehensive and beautiful tonality of nature.” It was more than mailing film to Eastman.

There’s a name for what Stieglitz was doing: sweat bias.

We tend to use effort as a proxy for quality. When it’s hard to evaluate the output, we often assume that more labor means more value. It’s why Jackson Pollock, whose work can look like someone assassinated a canvas with a paintball gun, made a point of emphasizing the “Herculean effort” behind every work. The sweat was the argument for the art.

In 1902, Stieglitz founded the Photo-Secession, a guild of photographers drawing a hard line between themselves and all of the “camera fiends.” This was a popular slander at the time to describe the Kodak-users who were snapping candid pictures of strangers on beaches and streets across America. The Photo-Secession embraced the term to besmirch these amateurs not because they were a risk to privacy, but because they were a risk to the good name of photography. The objection wasn’t the photos, it was the open invitation to be a photographer.

Camera Fiends: Act 2

Fast forward to another open invitation. In April 2026, the alt-rock band Better Than Ezra announced a contest inviting fans to co-write their next single using Soundbreak, an AI platform co-founded by frontman Kevin Griffin. Fans select a model trained on the band’s specific style, feed it lyrics, fragments, or just a general vibe, and the system builds on them. The winning track gets recorded and released as their next official single. You press the button. They do the rest.

The Needle Drop labeled participants as “non-musicians ‘desperately wanting’ to be songwriters.” (“Desperately Wanting” is a Better Than Ezra hit. Well played, sir.)

It’s the same sweat bias, just a different century. The objection isn’t to the output, no one had heard it yet. The objection is that the tool makes creativity too accessible, which makes it not creativity at all. Which is what Stieglitz thought of the Kodak.

Press the Button

Comedian Norm McDonald had a joke about how he only has one picture of his great grandfather. Meanwhile, his descendants will have 100,000 pictures of him and everything he did every day of his life.

Today, more than 2 trillion photographs are taken every year. They’re everywhere, taken by everyone, for every conceivable reason. And some of them are extraordinary.

Stieglitz was right that the Kodak changed photography forever. He was wrong that it was a crisis. The open gate didn’t destroy art, it multiplied the artists. Some of the people who walked though were tourists with Brownies. Some of them were Ansel Adams (yep, his first camera was a Brownie).

The fans using Soundbreak to co-write a Better Than Ezra single are pressing a button. So was every camera fiend on the beach in 1900. The establishment called both of them frauds.

But, when a new tool opens the gate, some of the people who come through will surprise us.

Press the button. See what happens.

Recommended reading:

• The 1912 War on Fake Photos, Pessimist Archive

Bootleggers were constantly passing off janky, error-riddled editions as his own. They were printing on “foul paper,” that carried an odd funk, and utilizing lettering that, as Aldus bitterly complained, “betray[ed] a certain Frenchiness.”

But here is the fascinating part. Aldus wasn’t mad that they were copying his words. He was mad that they were copying his vibe. He was furious that they had stolen his sleek, compact, right-leaning letters.

Bad news for Aldus. Today, we constantly rip off his 1501 text innovation, every time we hit Ctrl+I on a keyboard. We call it Italic.

The Renaissance Kindle

Aldus was the Renaissance equivalent of Gregg Zehr, the Amazon engineer who invented the Kindle. Before Aldus, books were massive, heavy, anchor weights. He was the portability guy. He created pocket-size books. Now, you could toss Virgil in your cloak, or sneak a little Cicero between boring council sessions. He even pitched them as battlefield reading.

But smaller pages meant fewer words. So, his punchcutter, Francesco Griffo, designed a fresh alphabet, modeled on the slick script used by papal clerks. It was an elegant, right-slanted, and highly compact type. When Aldus rolled it out in 1501, readers ate it up. And immediately, rival copycat bloggers in Venice, Brescia, and Lyon started pumping out cheap look-a-likes.

The Proto-Patent Playbook

So Aldus went to court, Renaissance-style.

He didn’t sue for copyright infringement, because the concept didn’t exist yet. In early print culture, you couldn’t own a story or an idea. But, you could get the state to protect your hardware. What Aldus had was a government “privilege,” a state-granted favor protecting the physical format and style of his books. It was essentially a proto-patent.

This privilege approach went back to the dawn of the printing press. By the 1440s, Johannes Gutenberg was rolling out pages on his wine-inspired device (it was literally a wine press). Two decades later, German printers set up the first press outside of Germany, in Rome.

As we covered in Part 2 of this series, In 1469, Venice had briefly handed a printer named Johannes de Speyer an absolute monopoly on printing. When Speyer died suddenly, the city pivoted, no more blanket monopolies, just case-by-case privileges to lure talent and techniques to town.

16th Century Patent Trolls

As a result, Venice exploded with presses. It quickly became Europe’s hottest print city. But with this boom came a popular, highly annoying new sport: privilege shopping.

It was the 16th-century version of patent trolling. The Venetians wouldn’t organize printing into a closed trade until 1549, so in the meantime, printers and publishers were hungry for any ad-hoc privilege that could protect their product. They would tweak a margin, adjust a woodcut, or change a binding, and then sprint to magistrates shouting, “Innovation!” just to lock down a mini-monopoly.

By 1517, the Venetian Senate was sick of it. With one sweeping decree, they nuked every existing print privilege in the city. Everything already in print fell instantly into the public domain.

Then Venice raised the bar. No more state protection for cosmetic changes. If you wanted a monopoly, the book had to be entirely new.

This sent printers scrambling. They couldn’t just repackage the exact same Latin texts with a slightly different font anymore; they needed fresh material. It was a small policy change with tidal wave repercussions. The focus of the law was broadening from guarding the tools to noticing the text, and importantly, the writers, who then began applying for their own privileges.

Now, let us not get ahead of ourselves, this still wasn’t modern copyright. It was a fragile, fleeting moment. By 1549, the guilds would muscle their way back in, locking authors out of membership and asserting their cartel grip on the industry. But the idea had surfaced, albeit briefly, that the person who creates the work may have a claim separate from the person who owns the tech.

Accidentally Inventing the Author

Which brings us back to Aldus, raging at bad paper and funny letters.

He was navigating a messy, transitional system that rewarded the look of the book rather than the soul of it. When Aldus fought the bootleggers, he thought he was just protecting his proprietary hardware, his beautiful slanted letters.

By fighting so aggressively to protect these formats, Aldus and his rival printers accidentally broke the very system they were trying to exploit. Their endless “privilege shopping” pushed the government to hit the reset button and demand entirely new content. In their scramble to protect it, they accidentally made the machine and its format, secondary.

The printing privilege had always been a hardware right. The idea that the author might own something separate from the format had barely been considered. For a fleeting moment, the spotlight shifted from the guy pulling the press to the guy wielding the quill.

Aldus may be spinning in his grave today as we all bootleg his italics, but he should take comfort. He went to court over a font. He helped invent the author.

History is full of ambitious criminals. Michael Smith looked at them and thought: there must be a lazier way.

This spring, the fifty-four-year-old North Carolinian stood in a Manhattan federal courtroom and pleaded guilty to one of the most unorthodox heists in music history.

Smith didn’t rappel through a skylight to steal recording equipment. He didn’t even hijack an eighteen-wheeler full of custom guitars. No, Smith managed to siphon more than $10 million directly from the pockets of thousands of working musicians, all without ever leaving the comfort of his ergonomic desk chair.

Over seven years, Smith used AI to generate hundreds of thousands of songs. He then deployed a robot army of fake listener accounts to stream them up to 600,000 times a day on platforms like Spotify. All told, he was raking in about $1.2 million per year.

Now you might be asking: Wait, how does a robot listening to songs steal money from a real artist? Well, it all comes down to the economics of streaming. Spotify doesn’t actually pay per stream. Instead, they take all the subscription money from listeners and dump it into one, giant communal tip jar. At the end of the month, the money is divided up based on market share. If Drake gets 5% of all the listens, he gets 5% of the tip jar.

By using bots to artificially inflate his slice of the pie, Smith was reaching his hand into that jar and pulling out dollars that belonged to other artists.

Naturally, the U.S. Attorney called it wire fraud. The major record labels, however, called it an existential emergency that threatened the very fabric of the art itself.

The feds were right about the fraud. Smith lied to the platforms about the source of his sudden popularity. But the major labels’ apocalyptic panic is where this story gets really revealing.

The real threat isn’t that AI can be used to manipulate the system. The threat is that AI allows an outsider to compete with the power brokers who already manipulate it.

As media scholar Charles Fairchild has pointed out: for decades, the major labels have used their own tools to steer attention toward the songs they want people to hear.

Michael Smith isn’t a threat to the art of music. He’s a threat to the rigged oligopoly of the music industry.

Guarding the Store Shelves

The music industry faces one massive economic problem: there is a near-infinite amount of music, but a finite number of ears. It is a business defined by an overwhelming oversupply and strictly limited demand. Making music isn’t the bottleneck. Getting heard is.

Imagine a grocery store receiving a hundred thousand new brands of cereal every day, but with only one shelf to display them. Whoever controls that shelf holds all the power, and it certainly isn’t the customer. In the music business, it’s been the major labels.

In the 1940s and 1950s, the shelf was the national radio networks. The major labels had cozy “ownership relationships” with all of them, ensuring that the artists they invested in were the ones you heard. That’s how you remove uncertainty from an unpredictable market; you run the industry like a cartel. You protect the shelf from the competition.

Then came the postwar baby boom. Millions of teenagers emerged, longing for authenticity rather than the sanitized, boardroom-approved crooners the labels were peddling. These customers wanted something different on the shelf.

Enter Alan Freed. In 1951, the young Cleveland DJ bypassed the national networks and started spinning original, independent R&B records for his local market. It was a new shelf for a new product. He coined the term “rock ‘n roll” and to his teenage audience, he was an authentic rebel.

Independent record labels, locked out of the national cartel, went straight to local DJs like Freed. They started slipping them cash to play their records, a practice soon dubbed payola.

While some called it bribery, economists recognize it as a decentralized pricing mechanism. It was a way to locally price a scarce resource (airtime) without the central bosses setting the rules. In a tightly controlled oligopoly, it was the only way an independent artist could be heard.

And it worked. Between 1955 and 1962, the major labels watched their market share crater from a dominant 74% to a terrifying 25 percent.

Changing the Rules

Slaughtered in a more open market, the cartel did what cartels invariably do: they ran to the government to change the rules.

Under the guise of grave concern over the “moral decay” of American youth, the old-guard music establishment, spearheaded by their powerful publishing arm ASCAP, partnered with a pliant Congress to launch the 1960 Payola hearings. As economists Joeri Mol and Nachoem Wijnberg note, the goal wasn’t so much to clean up a corrupt industry; it was to destroy the authenticity of the competition. They branded the local DJs as corrupt pushers of illicit noise.

Alan Freed refused to play along. He was suspended, charged with 26 counts of bribery, and died broke five years later.

With the upstart DJs crushed, the major labels reclaimed their shelf space. They replaced the local tastemaker with the “Top 40” countdown, claiming it was an “objective” measure of a song’s success based on sales. In reality, the labels just used their massive corporate budgets to replace illegal payola with “independent pluggers,” vendors who paid radio stations for airplay, but as perfectly legal marketing and advertising expenses.

The DJs had accidentally exposed a rigged game. Rather than fixing the system to make it more equal, the cartel simply crushed the whistleblowers and built a legal framework that allowed them to keep paying for play.

Same Song, New Verse

Which brings us back to Michael Smith and his bots.

Today’s shelf space isn’t a radio tower; it’s the Spotify algorithm. Think of digital streaming platforms like Spotify and Apple Music as grocery stores with near-infinite aisles, but only a few highly visible end-caps. Instead of a massive display of Frosted Flakes or Gatorade, the end-cap is a curated editorial playlist or the Autoplay algorithm. And the major labels shape the system by paying to control those displays.

Right now, a major label can agree to take a slightly lower royalty rate in exchange for Spotify artificially boosting their artist in your algorithmic playlists. (Which may explain why I get hit with Elton John over and over and over again. Please make it stop.) To be clear, this isn’t a call to regulate Spotify’s algorithm. The labels are doing what every rational incumbent does: buying shelf space with their advantages. The issue isn’t that they’re powerful. The critique is that when an indie artist gets a fighting chance, they’ll run to Washington to close it off.

As Nathan Brackett, former executive editor of Rolling Stone, explains in his newsletter, Stems, “some version of pay-for-play has been around since the dawn of the modern music biz….” So, as technological innovations change the game, the major labels rewrite the rules to retain their grip.

Michael Smith, much like the DJs of the 1950s, revealed a new way to bypass the gatekeepers, this time using artificial intelligence. Brackett notes that these AI tools have fundamentally changed the economics of the hustle. Because AI drops the cost of generating a track to “next-to-nothing,” it creates a “flywheel” effect. A fraudster like Smith can take endless, cheap shots at gaming the algorithm until something sticks.

To the industry incumbents, this isn’t just a problem; it’s an existential crisis.

The Cartel’s Complaint

So, when industry titans demand government crackdowns on AI to “protect artists” from manipulation, remember who’s asking. These are the same institutions that weaponized regulations to crush their competitors and built a royalty system that keeps artists dependent.

A V.P. of Warner Music Canada recently confessed to music industry veteran, Joel Gouveia: “For the first time in history, we don’t control the entire means of consumption.” While, the ghosts of 1950s radio DJs might quibble with the timeline, the panic is real. The cartel is losing its grip, and Michael Smith is the latest symptom.

Smith should be prosecuted. That part is not complicated. But we should be equally skeptical when the people who built the rigged game demand new rules.

After all, it is clear that the major labels do not oppose manipulation; they just oppose unauthorized manipulation.

The first recorded print privilege, granted by a European government, went to a 15th-century German expat named Johannes de Speyer.

By the 15th century, the Venetian Republic had mastered a kind of civic wooing that would make your local chamber of commerce drool. This municipal government lured enterprising immigrants with a buffet of incentives: rights of residence, debt cancellations, immunity from prosecution, and even forgiveness for sins… seriously. Come for the venture capital, stay for the eternal salvation. Even as early as 1272, if you knew your way around some wool, Venice would hand you a house rent-free for ten years.

Bypassing the Cartel

But one of their most popular carrots was the limited monopoly. They called it a “privilege”. (If you read part one of this series, you’ll remember Filippo Brunelleschi using this loophole to bypass the Florentine guilds).

This was a massive paradigm shift. For centuries, the medieval guild system had acted like a cartel, policing markets, enforcing secrecy, and crushing individual upstarts. Innovation moved at the speed of a bureaucratic permission slip. But Venice started protecting the individual. They realized that if you removed the threat of copycats and guild thugs, an entrepreneur could invest without worry.

Into this policy lab walked Johannes de Speyer in 1469. He was a print master from Mainz, where another Johannes, of the Gutenbergs, had designed and created the first movable type press in Europe. If early printing was a tech boom, Mainz was Silicon Valley. Speyer was the brazen engineer who packed up the plans for the most disruptive hardware of the age and trekked across the Alps to start his own firm.

On September 18, 1469, the Venetian Collegio granted Speyer the ultimate golden ticket: a five-year monopoly on all printing within the Republic. The state declared that his press was “such an innovation, unique and particular to our age and entirely unknown to the ancients, [that it] must be supported and nourished with all our goodwill and resources.” They practically handed him the keys to the city. No competition. Complete market dominance.

Speyer promptly set up shop and rolled out editions of Cicero and Pliny for the masses. He was poised to become the Jeff Bezos of the 15th century.

And then, just months later, he was dead.

The Glorious Chaos of Spontaneous Order

This is where the story takes a brilliantly ironic turn. Rather than pass the five-year print privilege down to his heirs, or sell it to the highest bidder, the Venetian government just shrugged and declared the monopoly void.

Overnight, the gates were thrown wide open. The printing press had come to town, but no guild controlled it. No individual had a “patent.” No ruling authority was throttling the output. It was an unadulterated open market.

And the market absolutely exploded.

Without the friction, the damp canal air soon filled with the scent of roasting varnish, linseed oil, and freshly pressed paper. Officials largely kept their hands off for years, and Venice became Europe’s undisputed capital of print. To put it in perspective: while Rome boasted a respectable thirty-seven presses, Venice topped two hundred.

By 1473, the locals were actually complaining that the city was drowning in books. Which is saying a lot for a city already under water. Print shops popped up on every corner; many failed, but then many also scaled. It was the first urban economy to experience the chaotic, glorious whiplash of mass print.

Building a New Tollbooth

Of course, the printers themselves hated the chaos. Open markets are great for consumers, but they’re terrifying for incumbents. The printers realized they couldn’t keep their prices up when the guy next door was printing the exact same Cicero. So, they inevitably began devising ways to tame the market, hoping to create artificial scarcity and protect their profit margins. These efforts to build new tollbooths laid the groundwork for the future of copyright.

But wait, didn’t we just crown Johannes de Speyer as the first copyright holder? Well, not exactly. What Speyer received was not a right; it was a privilege, a favor from the state. And it didn’t protect the copy, or the text; it protected the tech. You couldn’t copy his machine, but the words of Cicero were fair game. Think “proto-patent,” not copyright.

Still, the Venetian experiment was a massive leap. By bypassing the guilds, the state cracked the door to innovation. Then, Speyer’s untimely death blew the hinges off completely. The result was an information revolution fueled not by careful government planning, but by the spontaneous, world-changing power of a freer market.

But how did we get from protecting the heavy wooden press to protecting the actual words on the page? We’ll follow that trail next time.

In the 1430s, Florence was less Renaissance masterpiece and more a sprawling, chaotic construction site that smelled of wet lime, mule poop, and the dangerous scent of individuals deciding they could think for themselves. At the center of it all stood Filippo Brunelleschi.

Filippo had an engineer’s mind, an artist’s vision, and a serious problem with authority. He was currently busy designing and building the crown of the city’s Cathedral, the Duomo, a revolutionary dome that required his own bespoke crane system.

If you care about who gets to build, make, and invent—this is for you.

But, while the public marveled at the rising skyline, the “experts” were fuming. In 1434, instead of sending a letter of commendation, they sent the brute squad. Brunelleschi, the man literally raising the city’s soul and skyline, found himself in a damp cell, contemplating the reality that disrupting industry didn’t get you a VC check, just a bowl of gruel and a roommate named Rats.

The crime? He refused to share his new ideas with the guilds.

The HOA From Hell

Brunelleschi was a true engineering revolutionary, but he also had a radical, entrepreneurial impulse that defied Florentine dogma. He believed his ideas were just that—his ideas—and that he shouldn’t have to hand them over to the local cartel, the Arte de Maestri di Pietra e Legname, the Stonemasons and Woodworkers guild.

In the 1400s, the guild was straightforward. They owned the craft; you didn’t. If you wanted to work in their trade, membership was mandatory. These were not casual networking clubs. They were the medieval equivalent of an HOA run by the Sopranos. They didn’t just want your dues, they wanted a proprietary lien on your imagination.

Make shoes? Join the Calzolai guild. Carve steaks? Beccai guild. Heal the sick? Speziali guild.

To their credit, these guilds may have ensured your bridge didn’t collapse and your steak wasn’t, well, an alternative meat. But their primary function was “rent seeking,” a fancy term for restricting competition to keep prices up. Practice on your own and you could be fined, lose your shop, or, like Brunelleschi, spend time behind bars.

And guilds not only required membership, they also barred members from sharing trade knowledge with outsiders. This was the 15th century; there were no YouTube tutorials. If you wanted to learn how to practice law or finish cloth, you apprenticed with a master. And if you weren’t in the guild, the masters kept quiet. Loose lips don’t just sink ships; they mangle monopolies.

So, knowledge and skills were communal goods that belonged exclusively to the guild. You didn’t own your ideas.

The irony is that the guilds’ obsession with secrecy revealed just how valuable your know-how could be. When rules violently forbid you from sharing something, you start to wonder, hold up, there must be something to this. Brunelleschi certainly thought so. He believed as the author and the inventor of his techniques and devices, he had a claim to their worth. He had a sense of ownership that feels obvious to us now but was radical and offensive to the gatekeepers of the Renaissance.

A Wooden Middle Finger to the Committee

Fortunately for Brunelleschi, some government officials were questioning those gatekeepers too.

In 1421, a few years before his stint in the clink, Brunelleschi tried something unprecedented. Instead of appealing to a guild, he petitioned the Florentine state for exclusive rights to his boat design. Not just any boat, “The Monster” (Il Badalone). This wasn’t a gondola. It was a marble-hauling beast, and a giant, wooden middle finger to anyone that thought progress was a committee meeting decision.

Brunelleschi argued to the state that protecting his invention from copycats would spur him “to higher pursuits, and would ascend to more subtle investigations.” Give me a pathway to profit, and I’ll invent more really cool stuff.

Florence, hungry for economic growth and concerned about guild-secrecy suppressing new ideas, agreed. They granted Brunelleschi a three-year exclusive right to his “Monster.” And just to show you they were serious, they promised that if anyone built a bootleg version, they would burn it to ashes.

The Brilliant Bargain

Set aside the government-sanctioned arson and the irony of protecting your liberty by destroying someone else’s property, and notice the massive historical pivot.

The Florentine state was experimenting with a radical new concept: granting temporary monopoly privileges to an individual instead of a group.

Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Florence had not declared that “ideas are property.” The republic had simply discovered a pragmatic economic weapon. They realized that granting temporary exclusivity to an innovator could coax knowledge into the open, spurring innovation and progress.

It was a brilliant bargain: You take the risk of inventing something, and we will protect you from copycats so you can cash in. In exchange, your invention operates in the open, and eventually the public gets the blueprints. Florence had stumbled upon an approach that would animate copyright and patent concepts for centuries to come. Reward the inventor, without locking up the invention, and then watch what Matt Ridley calls, ideas having sex.

Brunelleschi’s dome still stands as the largest masonry vault in the world. And his two-shell design is the ancestor of the dome on the U.S. Capitol. It is truly ground-breaking. But his 15th-century bargain with Florence was also an architectural marvel. It was the foundation for a new world of progress built on a radical idea: that the best way to enrich the public isn’t to let a cartel hoard secrets, but to let the individuals own, and ultimately share, their own genius.

Within a few decades, another technology, arriving from a neighboring state and entirely free from the “expert” control of the guilds, would pour gasoline on these embers of transformation..

More on that next time.

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In the 1430s, Florence was less Renaissance masterpiece and more a sprawling, chaotic construction site that smelled of wet lime, mule poop, and the dangerous scent of individuals deciding they could think for themselves. At the center of it all stood Filippo Brunelleschi.

Filippo had an engineer’s mind, an artist’s vision, and a serious problem with authority. He was currently busy designing and building the crown of the city’s Cathedral, the Duomo, a revolutionary dome that required his own bespoke crane system.

But, while the public marveled at the rising skyline, the “experts” were fuming. In 1434, instead of sending a letter of commendation, they sent the brute squad. Brunelleschi, the man literally raising the city’s soul and skyline, found himself in a damp cell, contemplating the reality that disrupting industry didn’t get you a VC check, just a bowl of gruel and a roommate named Rats.

The crime? He refused to share his new ideas with the guilds.

The HOA From Hell

Brunelleschi was a true engineering revolutionary, but he also had a radical, entrepreneurial impulse that defied Florentine dogma. He believed his ideas were just that—his ideas—and that he shouldn’t have to hand them over to the local cartel, the Arte de Maestri di Pietra e Legname, the Stonemasons and Woodworkers guild.

In the 1400s, the guild was straightforward. They owned the craft; you didn’t. If you wanted to work in their trade, membership was mandatory. These were not casual networking clubs. They were the medieval equivalent of an HOA run by the Sopranos. They didn’t just want your dues, they wanted a proprietary lien on your imagination.

Make shoes? Join the Calzolai guild. Carve steaks? Beccai guild. Heal the sick? Speziali guild.

To their credit, these guilds may have ensured your bridge didn’t collapse and your steak wasn’t, well, an alternative meat. But their primary function was “rent seeking,” a fancy term for restricting competition to keep prices up. Practice on your own and you could be fined, lose your shop, or, like Brunelleschi, spend time behind bars.

And guilds not only required membership, they also barred members from sharing trade knowledge with outsiders. This was the 15th century; there were no YouTube tutorials. If you wanted to learn how to practice law or finish cloth, you apprenticed with a master. And if you weren’t in the guild, the masters kept quiet. Loose lips don’t just sink ships; they mangle monopolies.

So, knowledge and skills were communal goods that belonged exclusively to the guild. You didn’t own your ideas.

The irony is that the guilds’ obsession with secrecy revealed just how valuable your know-how could be. When rules violently forbid you from sharing something, you start to wonder, hold up, there must be something to this. Brunelleschi certainly thought so. He believed as the author and the inventor of his techniques and devices, he had a claim to their worth. He had a sense of ownership that feels obvious to us now but was radical and offensive to the gatekeepers of the Renaissance.

A Wooden Middle Finger to the Committee

Fortunately for Brunelleschi, some government officials were questioning those gatekeepers too.

In 1421, a few years before his stint in the clink, Brunelleschi tried something unprecedented. Instead of appealing to a guild, he petitioned the Florentine state for exclusive rights to his boat design. Not just any boat, “The Monster” (Il Badalone). This wasn’t a gondola. It was a marble-hauling beast, and a giant, wooden middle finger to anyone that thought progress was a committee meeting decision.

Brunelleschi argued to the state that protecting his invention from copycats would spur him “to higher pursuits, and would ascend to more subtle investigations.” Give me a pathway to profit, and I’ll invent more really cool stuff.

Florence, hungry for economic growth and concerned about guild-secrecy suppressing new ideas, agreed. They granted Brunelleschi a three-year exclusive right to his “Monster.” And just to show you they were serious, they promised that if anyone built a bootleg version, they would burn it to ashes.

The Brilliant Bargain

Set aside the government-sanctioned arson and the irony of protecting your liberty by destroying someone else’s property, and notice the massive historical pivot.

The Florentine state was experimenting with a radical new concept: granting temporary monopoly privileges to an individual instead of a group.

Now, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Florence had not declared that “ideas are property.” The republic had simply discovered a pragmatic economic weapon. They realized that granting temporary exclusivity to an innovator could coax knowledge into the open, spurring innovation and progress.

It was a brilliant bargain: You take the risk of inventing something, and we will protect you from copycats so you can cash in. In exchange, your invention operates in the open, and eventually the public gets the blueprints. Florence had stumbled upon an approach that would animate copyright and patent concepts for centuries to come. Reward the inventor, without locking up the invention, and then watch what Matt Ridley calls, ideas having sex.

Brunelleschi’s dome still stands as the largest masonry vault in the world. And his two-shell design is the ancestor of the dome on the U.S. Capitol. It is truly ground-breaking. But his 15th-century bargain with Florence was also an architectural marvel. It was the foundation for a new world of progress built on a radical idea: that the best way to enrich the public isn’t to let a cartel hoard secrets, but to let the individuals own, and ultimately share, their own genius.

Within a few decades, another technology, arriving from a neighboring state and entirely free from the “expert” control of the guilds, would pour gasoline on these embers of transformation..

More on that next time.

In the early 1960s, a young Bob Zimmerman was the Luke Skywalker of the burgeoning folk music renaissance. Operating under the name Bob Dylan, he was eagerly learning the ways of the folk from his own personal Obi-Wan Kenobi: a seasoned artist and historian named Paul Clayton. Then Obi-Wan sued Luke. Clayton took Dylan to court for copyright infringement.

Paul Clayton was a “song catcher.” He traveled the quiet dirt roads of the country, absorbing the stories and songs of remote America. In 1958, he found himself in a log cabin in Brown’s Cove, Virginia, listening to a local woman named Mary Bird McAllister. She sang an old tune for him called “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens.” No one knew who actually wrote it; it was just a vestige of oral tradition.

Clayton liked it. He took the framework, rewrote the lyrics, and recorded it as “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone).”

Dylan heard his mentor perform the song and, as musicians do, decided to spin it forward. He reworked the melody a bit, wrote some new lyrics, and recorded it. He called his version, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” It quickly became a defining anthem of Dylan’s career.

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Now, Dylan fully admitted he borrowed from Clayton. And Clayton had done exactly what musicians have been doing since a caveman first beat a stick against a rock: he took an old tune, updated it, and passed it along. Beethoven recycled Ranz, Handel imitated Erba, and Bach borrowed from Albinoni. Led Zeppelin quoted Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters recomposed Robert Johnson, who emulated Son House, who modeled a name lost in time.

But when Dylan did it, Clayton discovered a deep, abiding reverence for intellectual property rights. And two friends swapping an old communal tune were suddenly trapped in legal gridlock.

So, how did a mentorship become a lawsuit? It boils down to a fundamental tension in art: the creative instinct is communal iteration, but the market instinct is individual monopoly.

Most of our music: rock, blues, folk, and hip hop is deeply rooted in West African culture. Legal scholar Olufunmilayo B. Arewa explains that in those traditions, music is celebrated as a communal construction. The circle is the site of creativity. The focus is on function, ritual, participation, and continuity. The originality is in the performance not the composition. The innovation is in subtle shifts in rhythm, call and response phrasing, or instrumentation.

Those are the roots, but today, in the West, we see it differently. We harbor a romanticized notion of the artist as a sole creator, as an individual author. To protect that creator, we rely on monopolies.

Now, “monopoly” sounds scary, like a guy with a monocle who won’t let you pass Go or charges you exorbitant rent for Park Place. But excluding others both incentivizes creators (producers) and rewards us (consumers) with the fruits of their labor.

Does that mean we have monopolies that restrict the spread and use of ideas? Well, not exactly. Copyright protection does not extend to an idea, just the expression of that idea. I can’t copyright something in my head, only how I manifest it in the world.

In music, though, distinguishing between an idea and an expression is maddeningly murky. Let’s say you create an updated version of my song. My expression is now an idea for you, and with it you have created a new expression. So…. did you steal my expression or are you just participating in the circle of creativity?

With such a blurry line, over the years the law has been broadening the scope of rights. As scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan notes, copyright began as a reasonable protection for physical copies, stopping someone from bootlegging the sheet music you wrote. But now it regulates “performance, transformative works, slight and oblique references, and even access.” We’re hammering the communal circle of borrowing into a straight line of tightly defined ownership.

Which brings us to today. On one side, we have tech companies and emerging artists, leaning into the circle, approaching recorded history like an open-source buffet to pioneer the future. On the other side, we have labels and established artists protecting the livelihood of creators by requiring notarized permission slips for chord progressions. Which side is right?

The answer is in between, and the Founders understood this. They designed copyright as a compromise, a monopoly “to promote the Progress… of useful Arts” but only for “limited Times.” It’s enough exclusion to keep the lights on but not so much to starve the next generation of inspiration. But over time, as we’ve hammered more and more of the circle into a straight line, have we lost the balance?

In a healthy creative ecosystem, established Paul Clayton and upstart Bob Dylan can both pay their rent, but with claims to ownership that are not so excessive as to break the folk process. Today, as we consider building more fences, we should be careful. When we build too many gates in the desire to reward creators, we don’t just wall off the past, we hand the keys to whoever has the best lawyers. As a result, we could lock out the unknown Luke Skywalkers of tomorrow’s music.

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In the early 1960s, a young Bob Zimmerman was the Luke Skywalker of the burgeoning folk music renaissance. Operating under the name Bob Dylan, he was eagerly learning the ways of the folk from his own personal Obi-Wan Kenobi: a seasoned artist and historian named Paul Clayton. Then Obi-Wan sued Luke. Clayton took Dylan to court for copyright infringement.

Paul Clayton was a “song catcher.” He traveled the quiet dirt roads of the country, absorbing the stories and songs of remote America. In 1958, he found himself in a log cabin in Brown’s Cove, Virginia, listening to a local woman named Mary Bird McAllister. She sang an old tune for him called “Who’s Gonna Buy Your Chickens.” No one knew who actually wrote it; it was just a vestige of oral tradition.

Clayton liked it. He took the framework, rewrote the lyrics, and recorded it as “Who’s Gonna Buy You Ribbons (When I’m Gone).”

Dylan heard his mentor perform the song and, as musicians do, decided to spin it forward. He reworked the melody a bit, wrote some new lyrics, and recorded it. He called his version, “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right.” It quickly became a defining anthem of Dylan’s career.

Now, Dylan fully admitted he borrowed from Clayton. And Clayton had done exactly what musicians have been doing since a caveman first beat a stick against a rock: he took an old tune, updated it, and passed it along. Beethoven recycled Ranz, Handel imitated Erba, and Bach borrowed from Albinoni. Led Zeppelin quoted Willie Dixon, Muddy Waters recomposed Robert Johnson, who emulated Son House, who modeled a name lost in time.

But when Dylan did it, Clayton discovered a deep, abiding reverence for intellectual property rights. And two friends swapping an old communal tune were suddenly trapped in legal gridlock.

So, how did a mentorship become a lawsuit? It boils down to a fundamental tension in art: the creative instinct is communal iteration, but the market instinct is individual monopoly.

Most of our music: rock, blues, folk, and hip hop is deeply rooted in West African culture. Legal scholar Olufunmilayo B. Arewa explains that in those traditions, music is celebrated as a communal construction. The circle is the site of creativity. The focus is on function, ritual, participation, and continuity. The originality is in the performance not the composition. The innovation is in subtle shifts in rhythm, call and response phrasing, or instrumentation.

Those are the roots, but today, in the West, we see it differently. We harbor a romanticized notion of the artist as a sole creator, as an individual author. To protect that creator, we rely on monopolies.

Now, “monopoly” sounds scary, like a guy with a monocle who won’t let you pass Go or charges you exorbitant rent for Park Place. But excluding others both incentivizes creators (producers) and rewards us (consumers) with the fruits of their labor.

Does that mean we have monopolies that restrict the spread and use of ideas? Well, not exactly. Copyright protection does not extend to an idea, just the expression of that idea. I can’t copyright something in my head, only how I manifest it in the world.

In music, though, distinguishing between an idea and an expression is maddeningly murky. Let’s say you create an updated version of my song. My expression is now an idea for you, and with it you have created a new expression. So…. did you steal my expression or are you just participating in the circle of creativity?

With such a blurry line, over the years the law has been broadening the scope of rights. As scholar Siva Vaidhyanathan notes, copyright began as a reasonable protection for physical copies, stopping someone from bootlegging the sheet music you wrote. But now it regulates “performance, transformative works, slight and oblique references, and even access.” We’re hammering the communal circle of borrowing into a straight line of tightly defined ownership.

Which brings us to today. On one side, we have tech companies and emerging artists, leaning into the circle, approaching recorded history like an open-source buffet to pioneer the future. On the other side, we have labels and established artists protecting the livelihood of creators by requiring notarized permission slips for chord progressions. Which side is right?

The answer is in between, and the Founders understood this. They designed copyright as a compromise, a monopoly “to promote the Progress… of useful Arts” but only for “limited Times.” It’s enough exclusion to keep the lights on but not so much to starve the next generation of inspiration. But over time, as we’ve hammered more and more of the circle into a straight line, have we lost the balance?

In a healthy creative ecosystem, established Paul Clayton and upstart Bob Dylan can both pay their rent, but with claims to ownership that are not so excessive as to break the folk process. Today, as we consider building more fences, we should be careful. When we build too many gates in the desire to reward creators, we don’t just wall off the past, we hand the keys to whoever has the best lawyers. As a result, we could lock out the unknown Luke Skywalkers of tomorrow’s music.

The man with the most famous voice on Earth, broke the silence. “I got this for you,” Bing Crosby said. “Have fun.”

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The other man, the inventor of the electric guitar, Les Paul, stood in shock.

Both men saw the future in that trunk. But they saw opposite futures. Bing saw a way to do less. Les saw a way to do more. And in their hands, the face of music and entertainment would never, ever be the same again.

Why Bing wanted a break

To understand why Bing Crosby wanted to do less, you have to understand the plight of being Bing Crosby. In the 1940s, radio was live because recorded discs sounded terrible. So, if you had a show at 7:00 PM for New York and at 10:00 PM for Los Angeles, you performed it twice. Crosby, a man who treated leisure with the seriousness and devotion of a religion, hated this. He wanted to record the show in the morning and spend the afternoon on the golf course.

Enter Jack Mullin.

During World War II, Mullin was an Army Signal Corps officer. After D-Day he began discovering magnetic tape recorders, Magnetophons, across Germany. Audio recorded on them sounded as though it was being performed live. So, he brought two home to the U.S., along with 50 reels of tape, and began tinkering.

By June 1947, Mullin was ready to demonstrate this incredible technology in Hollywood. Bing Crosby sat amazed. He didn’t just hear audio fidelity; he heard tee times. He immediately hired Mullin and invested $50,000 in a small motor company, Ampex Corporation, to improve the Nazi tech… and to liberate his calendar.

It worked. Bing became the first to master commercial taping, creating a “fake” performance with edits and canned applause, a pace never heard before on radio, and the opportunity to hit the links by noon.

Technology, for Bing, was a hammock.

Les wanted more

Les Paul was different. Les didn’t want a hammock; he wanted an orchestra.

Since he was a kid, performing as, “Red Hot Red,” Les had been trying to accompany himself through recording. He’d built a crude recording lathe using a Cadillac flywheel from his dad’s garage, a drill belt from his dentist, and a paring knife from his mother’s kitchen. He would record a track to an acetate disc, then play along with that disc while recording to another disc. It was primitive, but it worked. And by the late 1940s he had mastered “Sound on Sound.”

In February, 1948, he released “Lover,” a song featuring eight frantic, shimmering electric guitars playing together at impossible speeds. Comedian W.C. Fields told him, “My boy, you sound like an octopus.” The industry couldn’t believe what they were hearing. But the process was complex, and the audio degraded with every layer.

Until Bing showed up in the driveway.

Bing may have thought that he was giving his friend a way to relax. Instead, Les looked at the new machine and decided to hack it. He wondered: if he added a second playback head, could he play a duet with himself on the same strip of tape without the degradation. So, he sketched the design on an envelope, packed up with his wife, and music partner, Mary Ford, and drove halfway across the country to the Ampex office in Illinois.

At Ampex, Paul screwed an extra playback head onto his machine. He then rushed back to his hotel and tested the design. It worked. He and Mary could record layers of sound. They danced around the room then returned home and turned their garage into a hit factory, churning out 16 Top 10 hits in just four years. They had transformed recording from a snapshot of a moment into a collage of sound.

Bing had used the machine to simulate reality so he could leave. Les used it to construct a hyper-reality that could never exist live.

Layers of authenticity

We tend to complain that technology ruins authenticity, that it’s cheating, lazy, or “not real.” But Les Paul reminds us that the “purity” of the past can oftentimes just be a ceiling on what’s possible. He didn’t use the machine to fake talent; he used it to stack talent.

Today, we are staring at AI like they stared at that Ampex 200A tape recorder. The choice remains the same. You can use it like Bing: write your emails faster so you can go play golf. (There’s nothing wrong with that; I miss golf.)

Or, you can use it like Les: to build layer upon layer of creativity that was previously impossible for one person to hold.

Yes, machines make life easier. But the real gift isn’t that it just saves you time; it’s that it removes limits on your own capability. It doesn’t just let you leave the studio early; it lets you build an orchestra.Bing Cr