It's important not just from a DRM and YRO perspective, but also from a historical perspective. That system has held in place until today, though you see technology (and history) repeat itself over and over. Fortunately, that didn't hold, and instead a licensing system was created where player piano roll producers paid the publishers a paltry fee per roll produced. They asked Congress to ban the piano roll and require that any new recording system be voted on by the sheet music publishers.

If no one had to play piano, then no one would, and the music would simply cease to exist. They considered the device to be sterile and even dangerous to the artistry of music. Naturally, the sheet music publishers were outraged. Even 'worse', the player piano was autonomous, and so you didn't need a musician at all to enjoy the music played. Enter the player piano roll, and suddenly these new device publishers could manually record, copy, and redistribute music en masse, and they did so with great frequency, never paying the sheet music publishers a dime. Sheet music publishers had a stranglehold on the industry. Prior to the hayday of the player piano, musical entertainment for home use required live performance. More than simply nostalgic, the piano roll was the first cheap medium for copying music, and as such it created the massive debaucle whose legacy is still carried on today by the RIAA. The humble beginnings of the ever-turbulent fight between music publishers and end-users comes to an end.

1700s aeolian player piano