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  • Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
  • Willis G. Regier
Adrian Johns . Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2010. Print. 640 pp.

"One can say," writes Adrian Johns, "that the history of piracy is the history of modernity" (516); but Johns is not much alarmed by that. His much praised The Nature of the Book relates the perils and perplexities of scholars and readers in the first centuries of print. Chapter 7 of that book, "Piracy and Usurpation," spends nearly a hundred pages on the emergence of plagiarism and poaching as matters of international concern. In Piracy Johns turns to practices that

extend far beyond the piecemeal purloining of intellectual property. They reach, in fact, to the defining elements of modern culture itself: to science and technology; to authorship, authenticity, and credibility; to policing and politics; to the premises on which economic activity and social order rest. . . . [T]here are not just pirate books, CDs, and videos, but pirate jeans, pirate motorcycles, pirate pharmaceuticals, [End Page 1161] pirate aircraft parts, and, of course, pirate Pokemon. . . . [A]llegations relate to gene patents, software, proprietary drugs, books, ballet steps, or digital downloading. What is at stake, in the end, is the nature of the relationship we want to uphold between creativity, communication, and commerce.

(3-4)

After scanning the wide range of piracy and alluding to a history that goes back to Thucydides, Cicero, and Augustine, Johns sets the "invention of piracy" in seventeen-century England (as he did in The Nature of the Book) and concentrates on subsequent instances of piracy of inventions, techniques, identities, discoveries, broadcasts, and all kinds of print from novels and scientific reports to magazines and sheet music. Johns investigates how intellectual piracy came to be considered an international problem, how it was defined by law, and how states and selected industries chose to constrain and combat it.

With frequent nods to France, the Netherlands, and German principalities, and more intense coverage of Ireland and the United States, Johns gives special attention to England because: (1) the concept of intellectual piracy is "a legacy of the place and period of the English Revolution [1660-80], and in particular of the commerce of the book there and then" (24); and (2) "copyright was an invention of eighteenth-century Britain" (109). In Britain, arguments about piracy divided between competing principles: property or liberty, regulation or free trade. After much legal maneuvering, piracy disputes in England were eventually regulated, tried, and enforced on the basis of property rights. Adam Smith "grew up amid these controversies" (116).

At the turn of the eighteenth century seagoing pirates seized ships and public attention from the Caribbean to the China seas. Books about pirates were in vogue and thus promptly pirated (43). Seaborne pirates supplied a host of words, metaphors, and analogies for other kinds of piracy, including imports, plagiarisms, epitomes, abridgments, connived publication of private papers, forgeries, and translations. Pirate reprints of whole works were the worst offenders because they sapped sales and were often carelessly corrupted or deliberately altered. Competition gave pirate publishers an incentive to be accurate and led some to enhance their editions with better printing or extra content, but speed to market and price per copy were trumps. The works of Locke, Rousseau, Newton, and Montesquieu were reprinted throughout Europe without their consent and without payment to them or their original publishers. The editions of The Sorrows of Young Werther that made it a European sensation were almost all pirated. "Enlightenment traveled atop a cascade of reprints," says Johns. "No piracy, we might say, no Enlightenment" (50).

Whether that summation applies to later periods occupies the rest of the book. His chapter on seventeen-century pharmaceutical piracies treats troubles still at large in our era of frauds, fashionable nostrums, and counterfeit drugs. Chapter 7, "The Land without Property," reviews the heyday of Irish pirated editions with an eye to contemporary practices.

The question Dublin's trade posed for eighteenth-century philosophes is one that interests us anew today. Our own knowledge industries are united with economists [End Page 1162] and legal authorities in proclaiming that a formal...

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