The music label and Recording Industry Association of America wars with digital music pirates began in the early aughts, but that’s not to say that music bootlegging sprang up only then. In fact, illegal music recording goes back to the introduction of portable recording devices. Fans would sneak them in to concerts and record their favorite artists — sometimes with the intent to profit, sometimes just to share. The bootlegging practice was already well established when one of the first cases of an artist fighting back came to court.

On this day, February 15, in 1967, the singer-songwriter group of Simon and Garfunkel began a court challenge against Pickwick records. Pickwick was an unknown label with rather low quality talent, but they were ambitious enough to take advantage of ambiguities in the law, compiling a series of early singles of Simon and Garfunkel when the two were still performing as Tom & Jerry, and releasing the album in stores.

Simon and Garfunkel weren’t the only ones to find themselves on the wrong end of the bootlegging: Miles Davis’s tour of Europe that same year was famously bootlegged all over. But the duo felt their brand would be damaged by the Pickwick release, and filed suit against the label. The courts quickly decided in favor of the group, and Pickwick’s LP was withdrawn from sale.