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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"

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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
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Piracy is dense, intricate, and has a nuanced tone, inviting multiple interpretations; yet several conclusions recur as cohesive threads, and together they help to explain why, in the book’s dedication, Johns chose to include the famous stanza from The Pirates of Penzance: “And it is, it is a glorious thing / To be a Pirate King!” First, Piracy argues by example that IP concepts and struggles have always been rooted principally in commerce and capitalism. The idea of copyright as protection for authors followed well after its role in safeguarding commercial interests of publishers and indeed mainly emerged as a way to justify the latter. Similarly, patents did not first emerge as a means to encourage inventors or protect their economic interests, and in this case too, the rhetoric of protecting inventors has helped to justify a system that has mainly served to protect the commercial interests of patent holders rather than inventors per se. Second, the idea that there might exist any inherent authorial or inventor’s property right has been repeatedly contested—for example, on the grounds that every innovation, literary or mechanical, must be based in part on copying, while further innovation depends on the freedom to copy and the free circulation of knowledge. Enlightenment revolutionaries like Matthew Carey upheld “the liberty of picking, choosing, culling, seizing, and borrowing” (p. 186). Such practices were seen to be part of the creative process, a necessary foundation for progress. Third, piratical practice was always the stimulus for new protective legislation, in an endless cycle of action and response. As new forms of information technology and techno-piracy emerged (easy, cheap copying, free listening, free communicating, free watching, and so on), battles for new forms of IP protection ensued. These included not only new legislation, but also new organizations and technologies of surveillance and control intended to detect and thwart the alleged pirates. Fourth, hypocrisy looms large in the stories that unfold in this book. In case after case we see actors first challenge the legitimacy of IP rights, and then advocate their extension, to protect their own commercial interests. Finally, as a cautionary message, the empirical narrative tells us that IP battles have been bound up with struggles over authority and authenticity. Pirated texts, ideas, and products—such as medicines—were often altered or debased, then recirculated as though emanating from the original source, raising the problem of how intellectual authority and authenticity could be preserved, which sometimes mattered a great deal.

Every book has its limitations; in the case of Piracy, they may best be viewed as calls for further research. The last half of the book, dealing with the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, seems somewhat less successful than the first half in integrating IP battles into the broader political history of the era. The book thus points to the need for more research to reveal how the anti-IP, free-trade, liberal political philosophy of the Victorian era became the pro-IP, free-trade political philosophy of neoliberalism a century later. How did that transformation occur, and at whose hands? Further, IP issues today are profoundly linked to issues of the North–South divide. Piracy reveals the importance of geography in IP battles, thus providing a necessary framework to understand North–South IP relations, but further research is needed to fill out this story.

The book’s cycle-paradigm approach also indirectly signals a need for more research, because it obscures an equally important phenomenon of historical accretion: history may be cyclical, but things never fully return to their starting point. So we also need a narrative that more fully explores the ever-expanding reach of IP regimes: not only their geographical expansion, but also their extension to new realms of knowledge, technology, commerce, and life. When Johns asserts that we are on the cusp of a new historical turning point in the IP cycle, it makes me wonder if the enormous accretion of institutions, laws, technologies, and systems intended to protect a growing realm of IP rights—built up over more than four centuries—have ultimately changed the dynamics of IP struggles in ways that this book does not adequately acknowledge. Has society’s margin of maneuver fundamentally shifted? The empirical evidence Johns provides of accretion of laws, organizations, and technologies to detect and deter piracy in both commercial and private domestic contexts suggests that this may well be the case.

Accretion over centuries matters in another sense as well: it signals the growing complexity in the IP realm, which constitutes an additional theme that must be addressed through further research. On the technological side, the growing complexity and variety of knowledge and artifacts have made patent systems increasingly unworkable in practice, in at least two ways. First, patent examiners the world over are being forced to make quick judgments on increasingly complex and abstruse issues—they cannot have a proper handle on all the fields they have to cover—so it has become easier to patent old ideas through creative use of complex technical jargon, or to hide key elements of an innovation that in principle are supposed to be revealed. Second, complexity affects the way knowledge and multiple IP rights intersect and overlap. How many patents underlie a cell phone? Who can make any new device without confronting any number of existing IP rights? One of the by-products of this kind of complexity is the emergence of systems whereby large companies effectively pool their patents, increasing their joint power vis-à-vis smaller companies or outsiders. An early justification for patents for inventions was to ensure a level playing field, yet today patents can have the opposite effect. And finally, accretion and complexity have made it possible in practice to extend IP rights indefinitely over time. Each patent may have a limited duration, but companies ensure that each set of patents is linked to a new set in a never-ending cycle.

Piracy is a brilliant book, full of ideas and certain to become a classic in the history of technology, the history of science, and the history of IP. It offers new approaches to the study of both IP and science–technology–society relations. It is great for browsing, yet the full force of its line of argument requires a careful, cover-to-cover reading. Those willing to invest the time will be amply rewarded.

Eda Kranakis is a professor of history at the University of Ottawa. Her research spans the period from the eighteenth century to the present, and she has long been interested in the role of intellectual property in technological change and technology–society relations.

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©2011 by the Society for the History of Technology.