Secret 4 is a little different than the oft-repeated slogan, “Those who ignore the past are doomed to repeat it.” Instead, it says that media face the same issues over and over again as technologies change and new people come into the business.The fight between today’s recording companies and file sharers has its roots in the battle between music publishers and the distributors of player piano rolls in the early 1900s. The player piano was one of the first technologies for reproducing musical performances. Piano roll publishers would buy a single copy of a piece of sheet music and hire a skilled pianist to have his or her performance recorded as a series of holes punched in a paper roll. That roll (and the performance) could then be reproduced and sold to anyone who owned a player piano without further payment to the music’s original publisher.
