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Reviewed by:
  • Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
  • Christine Haynes (bio)
Adrian Johns , Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010, 640 pp. $35.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.

In the wake of the recent "information revolution," there has been intense anxiety and debate about the piracy of intellectual property. In this wide-ranging and thought-provoking book, however, Adrian Johns reminds us that piracy—and the conflict over it—is by no means new. Neither a peculiar adjunct to the digital revolution nor a mere accessory to legal doctrine, piracy has a centuries-long history. Johns seeks to recover this history in a study that moves from the invention of printing in the fifteenth century to the rise of the Internet at the end of the twentieth, from the continent of Europe to the United Kingdom and United States and to Asia and Africa. Encompassing everything from the piratical Enlightenment of the eighteenth century to the "pirate bus" of the late Victorian era in London, from the pirate sheet music of the 1890s to the "pirate listening" of the 1920s, from the advent of "home piracy" with audio- and videotape in the 1980s to phreaking, hacking, and fudding today, he demonstrates how piracy is linked to "the defining elements of modern culture itself," including science and technology, authorship and authenticity, commerce, public education, policing, and democracy (p. 3).

In order to chart the connection between the notion of piracy and the rise of modernity itself, Johns begins by tracing the origin of the concept. The word "piracy" derives from a distant Indo-European root meaning "trial" or "attempt"—or by extension, "experiment." By the time of Thucydides, peiratos, who had formerly been viewed as honorable, came to signify sea-going thieves, ur-criminals, enemies of humanity. Not until the printing revolution and the golden age of Caribbean buccaneering in the early modern period, however, did the term "piracy" come to signify intellectual theft. This usage developed first in England in the wake of the Glorious Revolution, when the lapse of licensing provoked a clash between state and guild authority over print. Paradoxically, as Johns asserts,

[i]t was in these years of no property—between 1695 and 1710—that piracy really became an everyday concept for London's writers and readers. Suddenly it was being referred to everywhere, in poetry, newspapers, ballads, correspondence, and essays. Just as piracy as a legal category ceased to exist, so piracy as a cultural category blossomed. A major reason for this, of course, was that attention was riveted on struggles with real, seagoing pirates, most notably in the Caribbean.

(p. 43) [End Page 143]

Denoting a wide range of sins involving the misappropriation of ideas (including plagiary, epitomizing, abridging, and even translating), the notion of piracy provoked the invention of intellectual property, not vice versa. In response to concern about this "shibboleth of the new society" (p. 44), in 1710, the English Parliament passed the Statute of Queen Anne, which was interpreted over half a century later by the House of Lords in the Donaldson v. Becket case of 1774 to grant authors and their publishers a "temporary copyright" over their works. According to Johns, the invention of copyright, which hinged on the notion of "expression" to distinguish literary authorship from technical invention, constituted a "victory for the pirates" (p. 111).

In his retelling of the story of the invention of copyright, Johns emphasizes that piracy, like property, is defined spatially; in his words, it is a "phenomenon of geopolitical thresholds" (p. 13). Not surprisingly, then, piracy has historically thrived in places whose territorial autonomy remained ambiguous, such as Scotland, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the German lands, Ireland, and the United States. In a series of chapters (7, 8, and 11), Johns examines the careers of the biggest pirates on the fringes of the British Empire, such as Matthew Carey, who built a very successful publishing house, first in Dublin and then in Philadelphia, by reprinting popular English works. He then traces how, in response to such piracy, between the late eighteenth and late nineteenth centuries governments began to protect intellectual property, first on...

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