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Peter Soppelsa, "Intersection: Technology, Mobility, Geography"

Film Review
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Essay Reviews
Shannon Jackson, "Technology, Bodily Limits, and Ways of Knowing: Joy Parr, Sensing Changes"

Eda Kranakis, "'And it is, it is a glorious thing/To be a Pirate King!': Adrian Johns, Piracy"

Peter A. Shulman,"The Richest Hills Unearthed: Timothy J. LeCain, Mass Destruction"

Amy E. Slaton, "The Uses of Context: Steen Hyldgaard Christensen, Bernard Delahousse, and Martin Meganck, eds., Engineering in Context"

Technology and Culture
October 2011

"And it is, it is a glorious thing
To be a Pirate King!":
Adrian Johns, Piracy

Eda Kranakis
We often hear the expression, “Those who ignore history are bound to repeat it.” This notion favors a linear view of history: the past need not recur, provided it is adequately remembered. Adrian Johns’s Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. Pp. 626. $35) starts from a different premise: it combines a cyclical view of history with a Kuhnian model of transformative paradigm shifts. The benefit of historical knowledge under this model is to help navigate the great cyclical recurrences that inevitably take place. Johns sees the current upswell of global debate over intellectual property—brought on by new forms of knowledge, technology, and piracy—as evidence of a major paradigm shift and onset of a new historical cycle. His finely crafted, wideranging study is offered as assistance in negotiating this turning point.

Piracy has an unusual footprint. Defined by three key features, the result is an innovative, often unexpected path through the vast landscape of intellectual property (IP) history that runs from the Renaissance to the present. The first distinguishing feature is the choice of piracy as the pivot around which the book is constructed. This choice focuses the narrative on sites of struggle, contention, and negotiation—both conceptual and geographical—that have defined the meaning and limits of IP in each era. The issue of piracy brings us straight to the heart of IP’s eternal, recurring problem: how to define and regulate IP rights in ways that are politically acceptable and consistent with both freedom and the common good. The second key feature of Piracy is an integrated cultural, intellectual, and political history approach. Johns analyzes IP trends in relation to major cultural shifts, such as the Enlightenment, Romanticism, the Victorian era, and the radical 1960s. He explores each era’s prevailing visions of the nature of creativity, science, invention, and their interconnectedness, and how these were linked to IP struggles. He adds politics into the mix by also tracing IP developments as they relate to questions of political authority and state power. The interconnections run deep. After all, one starting point of IP—the patent—began as a prerogative of royal or political authority. Johns delineates the intersections between great political turnings and IP cycles. He shows, for example, that the very notion of intellectual piracy was a by-product of the English Revolution and Restoration. Finally, Johns adopts a constructivist approach. He does not assume that the meaning of terms like “piracy,” “intellectual property,” and “copyright” are universal, timeless, or transcendent; rather, he shows how, when, and why they emerged and how they have shifted over time. As a case in point, IP—an umbrella term that integrated patent and copyright—emerged only in the last half of the nineteenth century, roughly 200 years after the idea of intellectual piracy.

Piracy is not intended as anything like a complete history of IP battles, if such were possible. Its historical coverage is fragmented: it does not offer a full analysis of any piece of IP legislation; it mainly looks at the Anglo-Saxon world; and it considers only a few segments of the IP landscape, notably publishing and mass-communications media (telecommunications, analog and digital media). Ultimately, the book is a series of carefully chosen vignettes, each intended to reveal an important development, turning point, or deeper truth about IP and its history. What makes the narrative coherent, powerful, and meaningful in a larger sense is the fact that piracy is such a key nexus in IP–society relations. Moreover, this focus calls forth certain crucial topics that might otherwise be overlooked. Ireland does not spring to mind as a centerpiece of IP history, yet it is important in Piracy because it did not have any copyright law in the eighteenth century. Ireland lay beyond the geographic reach of English copyright law at that time, which made Irish publishers important competitors of English publishers—“pirates” in the latter’s view. The case of Ireland underscores two theoretical points: the geographic limits of IP laws have been central in struggles to define and regulate piracy; and what constitutes “piracy” is ever contested and contestable. Irish publishers saw themselves as agents of freedom and enlightenment; they made knowledge and cultural heritage accessible to wider audiences by providing affordable editions and undercutting the oligopoly of London publishers. Thus each side viewed the other as pirate.

Historians of technology will find much of value in this book. It gives extensive coverage to technological issues, including chapters on the origins of medical patenting, on the anti-patent movement in Victorian Britain, on radio piracy in early-twentieth-century Britain (that is, illegal listening), on illegal copying of records, tapes, and the like, and on phreaking and hacking in the telephone and internet eras. Its approach, moreover, offers an innovative point of departure for renewed study of IP’s role in technology–society relations. It reminds us how profoundly mutable IP visions and regimes have been over time. Johns shows that the prevailing American vision in the wake of its revolution was to foster manufactures through a combination of high tariffs and deliberate efforts to copy and import British and continental European technology. Americans viewed these measures as agents of freedom, economic development, and a means to enhance the common good—quite the opposite of official views today. Piracy also opens up new perspectives on the nature of creativity and innovation in the literary, scientific, and technological spheres. And more than any other study I know of, it reveals the deep connections between patents and copyright and how their histories have been intertwined for centuries.

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©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.