Music Piracy

Music Piracy

By 1882, Edison had a dynamo that operated at 82 percent efficiency. In September, 1882, he had opened a central station on Pearl Street in Manhattan and was eventually supplying electricity to a one-mile square section of New York.

Enter Alexander Graham Bell and his cousin, Chichester Bell. The Bells got together with an instrument maker named Charles Sumner Tainter and they set out to make a better version of Edison's phonograph design. The new design was called the Graphophone and the main improvement was that their version, using recorded cylinders, gave a longer life to the recordings. They could simply be played more times than Edison's tinfoil phonograph design. The intent was to market it as an office aid, much the same as we view tape recorders today, as a dictation machine.

Of course, Edison was irate when he found out about this. He felt that Graphophone had basically stolen his idea. So much so that when Graphophone asked him to pool their patents, Edison said he wanted nothing to do with Bell and his "pirates". No one had even started selling recordings yet and the word "pirate" was already being used in relation to intellectual property. So don't think for a moment that Hilary Rosen thought that up by herself. Edison gets credit for that one, too.