Piracy
The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
Since the rise of Napster and other file-sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.
Piracy explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’s graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.
American Society for Information Science and Technology: ASIST Book of the Year Award
Won
Choice Magazine: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Awards
Won
The University of Chicago Press: Gordon J. Laing Award
Won
History of Science Society: HSS-Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize
Short Listed/Finalist
"In his invaluable book Piracy, Adrian Johns argues that the tendency of intellectual property battles to undermine privacy is not new. On the contrary, Johns . . . argues that ever since the medieval and Enlightenment eras, corporations have tried to defend their economic interests by searching for intellectual piracy in the private sphere of people's homes. He says that all of our current debates about intellectual piracy—from Google's efforts to create a universal digital library to the fight over how vigorous patents should be—have antecedents in the copyright wars of earlier eras."
“Johns makes a bold claim: disputes over intellectual piracy have touched on so many crucial issues of creativity and commerce, identity and invention, science and society, that tracing them amounts to ‘a history of modernity from askance.’ . . . More generally, Piracy shows us how the very notion of intellectual property—and its sharp division into the fields of patent and copyright—was created in response to specific pressures and so could be modified dramatically or even abolished. . . . ‘We are constantly trying to shoehorn problems into an intellectual framework designed 150 years ago in a different world.’”
1. A General History of the Pirates
2. The Invention of Piracy
3. The Piratical Enlightenment
4. Experimenting with Print
5. Pharmaceutical Piracy and the Origins of Medical Patenting
6. Of Epics and Orreries
7. The Land without Property
8. Making a Nation
9. The Printing Counterrevolution
10. Inventors, Schemers, and Men of Science
11. International Copyright and the Science of Civilization
12. The First Pirate Hunters
13. The Great Oscillation War
14. Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science
15. The Pirate at Home and at Large
16. From Phreaking to Fudding
17. Past, Present, and Future
Acknowledgments
Notes
Index
History: American History | European History
Law and Legal Studies: Legal History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature | British and Irish Literature
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