Labels secured laws that forced digital music to mimic physical media limits

Evidence

Waging an aggressive public relations campaign well before the effects of Napster, the vested industry players were able to deliver concrete policy results in their favor: the Audio Home Recording Act (AHRA) in 1992, which established royalties, anti-circumvention provisions (breaking the technological barriers set up to protect copyright), and anti-copying provisions on digital recording devices; the Digital Performance Right in Sound Recordings Act (DPRA) in 1995, which established digital public performance rights; and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) in 1998, which vastly expanded anti-circumvention and copyright infringement penalties. “The music cartels,” according to Aram Sinnreich, “artificially limited the functionality of digital music to emulate the inherent limitations of twentieth-century distribution platforms, thereby preserving the integrity of economic and institutional models premised on those limitations.” — Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, 201

Categorization

• DEFINE: Precisely defines AHRA, DPRA, and DMCA and their effect on digital music formats.
• ADDENDUM: This parallels the grafted-tree narrative of artificially constrained natural systems — here copyright law artificially constrains digital distribution to preserve business models.