Democracy of Sound tells the story of the pirates, radicals, jazzbos, Deadheads, and DJs who challenged the record industry for control of recorded sound throughout the twentieth century. A political and cultural history, it shows how the primacy of "intellectual property" gradually eclipsed an American political tradition that was suspicious of monopolies and favored free competition. Cummings makes a quiet case for moving towards a less repressive intellectual property regime in the Creative Commons vein. But he's not an ideologue, and the his main contribution is not to propose a particular legislative path for copyright. Rather the book is valuable because it shows how long, and how thoroughly, the history of recorded music has been the history of "pirated" music ... Whatever rules are established, Cummings' book makes clear that piracy will continueand that that is far from being a bad thing. Certainly, some copiers are rip-off artists. But others are fans, or even creators.