There was certainly an amount of pirating of rolls in the UK market
back in the good old days.  Some of this was quite possibly legal at
the time, as the roll market emerged before the growth of the body of
thinking that came to be known as "Mechanical rights".

A good indication of a roll originating from Aeolian is that the melody
line will have been delayed by a punch row here and there for the
Themodist system to pick it up.  It's interesting to see the same type
of editing occurring on non-Themodist rolls from other makers, which
certainly suggests a pirated master.

A common offender was Kastner, who appear to have made a small amount
of their own rolls for the "Triumph" label, as well as re-labelling
genuine products from numerous other makers.  Their own perforators
were designed for the Kastonome system, so lacked both sustaining
pedals and Themodist-style accenting, so if you get one of these
in the box when expecting a relabelled Aeolian product it's rather
a disappointment, just as it must have been when the rolls were new.
It's quite possible that many purely-arranged rolls were pirated,
because it's so hard to tell unless there are giveaway editing
artifacts in the original.

Another type of pirating was not of the rolls but the catalogues.
The Perforated Music Company in London ran their own rolls as "Imperial
Linenized", and also had a general-sales label called "Omnia".  Aeolian's
generic brand was "Universal".  The sneaky trick was to give the Omnia
rolls the same serial numbers as their Universal competitors.  No need
to print an Omnia catalogue! Thanks to the ever-observant John Phillips
in Tasmania for spotting this one.

In the 1920s there was yet another type of pirating, thanks to the
"S&P" label.  This, apparently, used an 88-note pushup pianola on a
recording piano to create "hand-played" rolls from Aeolian's Themodist
product.  This was picked up in interviews with the offenders in later
years.

As Dan Wilson alluded to, the late Steve Cox (Laguna Rolls) was a great
one for believing that the world deserved to have more copies of certain
rolls than their original manufacturer had so far managed to produce,
and at one time was offering both original and home-produced copies of
some rolls!

Which brings us to the latest days of production.  Reconstructed master
files from the rollscanning project are being used by a number of
makers to make high-quality replica rolls, and I hope the number will
continue to grow -- there is no excuse now for producing old-fashioned
analogue [asynchronous] copies.

It's rather amusing to see how (and to wonder why) this substantial
advance in roll preservation has piqued a few individuals.  Rollscanners'
stated aim, of producing roll masters for proper replica roll production,
has been fully achieved, and with time it's not unreasonable to imagine
building up fairly substantial catalogues of reconstructed roll masters
ready for cutting on demand.

When does making copies of old rolls become piracy?  In the UK, the
mechanical rights on a roll or record last for 50 years from publication,
so anything produced prior to 1955 can be copied without permission of
the maker or their successors.  A replica roll is itself protected for
25 years by publication rights.  There are other rights in the music
itself, with quite different (and much longer) timelines, but mechanical
rights are nice and simple (although with growing calls to extend the
length of time, seeing that commercial value in old recordings now
often exceeds 50 years).

The rules in the USA will certainly be different in many details, and
copyright terms have been lengthened, but this probably doesn't matter
because the rights to many rolls have probably lapsed, not been
protected, or cannot be established.

Julian Dyer