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."

XREF: Connects to broader histories of how incumbent industries use lobbying to shape technology regulation, e.g., early radio and film copyright battles.

Andrew deWaard, Derivative Media, loc. 201