Search Results

This chapter looks at the role of the oral history interviewer in shaping the narrative when the interviewer has a distinct nostalgic impulse, which is then surprisingly countered by many former residents. Residents talk about community and neighborliness but add back into the oral history narrative elements (including violence, crime, prostitution, and bootlegging) that jibe more closely with the historical reputation that the interviewer is attempting to counter, ultimately creating a more balanced historical view.

This chapter examines the story of the “King of Craw” John Fallis. Fallis was larger than life. He was a grocer, a bootlegger, a neighborhood boss, and a “Robin Hood” figure who gave back to the poor, he influenced the voting block that was the neighborhood, faked his own death, shot three policemen in one evening, and was a fugitive from the law. Although he was killed in 1929, his legend continues today and he endures as a symbolic presence for a neighborhood no longer in existence. This chapter takes a close look at the role of legend and folklore in oral history and resultant public memory of this community.

This chapter explores the ambivalence of the copy by examining the impact of low-quality, unauthorized digital bootlegs on the domain of experimental film, an area of practice that has historically exhibited a strong investment in medium specificity and the moral rights of the filmmaker. I confront these issues through a case study of Josiah McElheny’s The Past Was A Mirage I’d Left Far Behind (2010), a year-long installation at the Whitechapel Gallery in London that consisted of copies of historical abstract films taken from UbuWeb – an online repository of low-definition files posted without permission of the filmmakers – and projected onto prismatic screens.

This chapter interrogates how artists’ moving image has grappled with the increased ridigification of copyright that has occurred over the last two decades. Many artists champion the freedom to reuse copyrighted materials, but fail to interrogate the particular circumstances that it make possible for them to do so without retribution, while simultaneously avoiding an engagement with the significant encroachments on fair use and the public domain that have been implemented as part of new copyright legislation that seeks to control the unruliness of digital reproduction. As a counterpoint to such positions, this chapter examines Ben White and Eileen Simpson’s Struggle in Jerash (2009), a work made by repurposing a public domain film of the same title made in 1957 in Jordan. Simpson and White contest the increasing privatization of visual culture, insisting on the wealth of the cultural commons precisely as it is under threat.

This chapter examines the creation of a regional market for Japanese popular culture, with particular emphasis on the expansion of music and television companies into East Asia since the end of the 1980s. It begins with a review of the macro politicoeconomic conditions that contributed to the transfer of Japanese popular culture to East Asia. It then provides a quantitative analysis of the market share of Japanese music and television programs in East Asia and goes on to discuss how Japanese music and television companies have become actively involved in local cultural scenes. It shows that Japanese music and television have carved out a sizable position in East Asian regional markets. The chapter also considers the role of piracy in enhancing the dissemination of Japanese cultural commodities in East Asia and the relationship between censorship and bootleg markets. It proposes a new framework for viewing the dynamism of bootleg markets in East Asia.

This chapter explores the significance of Prohibition for the evolution of organized crime in Chicago. It shows that Prohibition provided the opportunity for the city's vice entrepreneurs and criminal gangs to extend their activities into bootlegging. Levee district vice mongers such as Johnny Torrio and Al Capone competed with criminal gangs such as the Valley Gang, the O'Banion Gang, the Genna Brothers, and others for control of the illegal alcohol racket. The end result was the infamous “beer wars” of the 1920s, which sparked violence on the streets of Chicago. The Capone syndicate won out in the end, establishing itself as the supreme overlord of vice and crime in Chicago. The chapter examines how, after the end of Prohibition in 1933, the Syndicate, as Capone's organization became known, extended its operations to include control of all illegal gambling in Chicago and embarked on an extensive racketeering campaign to seize control of trade associations and labor unions in the Chicago metropolitan area.

This chapter discusses the Jews' bootlegging activities, with particular attention to the “rabbinic wine scandals” engendered by the Volstead Act's sacramental wine dispensation. Prohibition regulation granted special dispensation that gave American Jews access to sacramental wine for religious purposes, and established procedures by which Jews could buy and sell it. This dispensation emerged early in the Prohibition era as a massive breach through which hundreds of thousands of illegal alcohol flowed. The fact that Jewish alcohol production, purveyance, and consumption was actually built into federal Prohibition law had a profound effect on Jewish attitudes toward Prohibition, and on prohibitionists' attitudes toward Jews.

This chapter examines how collectors, listeners, and entrepreneurs took advantage of a legal gray zone—that composers deserved to benefit from recordings of their work but that record companies did not enjoy a copyright for their recordings—to rerelease old and out-of-print recordings, beginning in the 1930s. It considers how such activities landed bootleggers in court, often with indecisive results, and triggered a struggle for property rights. The chapter looks at the career of Eli Oberstein to illustrate the way some in the music business played fast and loose with sound recordings in the mid-twentieth century. It also explores the recording industry's lobbying to obtain federal copyright protection for its products, the issue of copying and distributing popular music, and the surge of bootlegging after World War II.

This chapter focuses on the spread of piracy to popular music, particularly rock, as a young generation embraced both tape technology and radical rhetoric to position bootlegging as part of a general social ferment in the late 1960s. It looks at the emergence of a large, creative, and unruly pirate market that operated parallel to the mainstream music industry, along with Congress's passage of a copyright law for sound recordings. It also considers the alliance between bootlegging and counterculture, and how it produced a legacy that documented much of the music of the age on illicit records.

This chapter examines the reality of bootlegging in the aftermath of copyright reform in the 1970s, as pirates in the United States adapted to a newly hostile legal climate by developing new networks of production and exchange. It considers the emergence of new genres such as jam music and hip-hop that challenged ideas of ownership, along with the bootlegging of live and unreleased tracks by rock artists. It also examines how followers of artists such as Kraut, the Grateful Dead, and Brucie Bee became part of a new structure for music distribution. In addition, the chapter looks at the case of the Grateful Dead, whose model anticipated the ideas and strategies of Creative Commons, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and other copyright activists. Finally, it discusses the mixtape as a medium for bootlegging hip-hop.

This chapter examines how a variety of business interests, including record labels and software companies, coalesced behind the idea of “intellectual property” and international organizations took a series of steps to stem the rising tide of piracy around the world during the 1970s. It first considers the economic crunch of the late 1970s that hit the music industry in Europe and the United States hard before turning to a discussion of the increase in illicit copying of American goods and how piracy in developing nations piggybacked on industrialization. It then looks at bootlegging in countries such as Taiwan, Singapore, Thailand, and Nigeria before concluding with an assessment of the persistence of piracy under the new international regime and the emergence of China as a formidable foe of antipiracy campaigners.

This chapter examines how social media such as YouTube and Facebook became tools for piracy and bootlegging by recasting the Napster model of peer-to-peer sharing as social networking. It explains how social networking sites became a medium for online sharing of images, texts, and sounds copied and distributed among users. By harnessing the social relationships among people (“peers”), these websites enable the distribution of creative works that differed significantly from the mass production or broadcasting model of twentieth-century media. The chapter discusses the implications of the social world of music for copyright and intellectual property before concluding with an assessment of the economics and politics of piracy.