Ars Technica’s Nate Anderson has written an excellent history of how the content industry has fought against pretty much every technological advancement over the past 100 years for fear it would end creative expression forever. As we know this isn’t true. Rather, technology helps increase the market for these creative works (and other industries) by decreasing costs and increasing efficiency. It is much cheaper and easier to create and distribute music than it was 10 years ago, let alone 100 years ago.

Anderson profiles the content industry’s fight against the gramophone and player piano. John Philip Sousa campaigned to Congress to ban these evil machines for replacing live performances, not recognizing that home recordings might increase the demand for those live performances. This gave birth to the compulsory license system, where the government set rates sheet music must pay to songwriters, we have still to this day, though it has been vastly expanded.

Photocopiers spelled doom for the print industry, with UCLA law professor Melville Nimmer saying “the day may not be far off when no one need purchase books.” While the U.S. and its courts upheld a fair use right to copying, Canada and other countries must pay royalties to collection agencies for every copy. Canada pays the same tax on rewritable CDs and iPods because they might be used for pirated content.

Movie companies famously referred to the VCR as the “Boston strangler” as it killed the movie industry. Universal sued Sony over Betamax all the way to the Supreme Court to ban the use of home recording. Once found legal, movie companies decided to sell copies of their own movies to home viewers, a revolutionary practice that led to the multi-billion dollar home video and rental market.

Pretty much every expansion into digital media has been fought tooth-and-nail by the content industry, from Napster to DVR to the iPod.

Anderson also left out some other highlights. Cable TV, when originally introduced, featured almost exclusively pirated content from network television. This allowed cable television to expand far enough that it could afford its own programming. Even the movie industry began by fleeing New York to Hollywood to escape enforcement of Thomas Edison’s patents and the high prices he charged to anyone wanting to make movies.

Presently, the DMCA makes sure technological innovations are few and far between to help the content industry.  While CDs were released without DRM and thus able to be ripped onto computers and people’s iPods, DVDs are copy-protected and thus illegal to copy in anyway. Even though it is easy to do so, no software or hardware can be released that can take advantage of people’s massive DVD collections.  Even though the content industry claims it would never sue to ban innovation, the industry has done so several times, and won these cases, holding back technology and innovation that consumers want and could do more to help expand the content market.