Piracy

by Johns, Adrian

• ISBN13: 9780226401188
• ISBN10: 0226401189
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-01-15
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

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 realizedone that has been largely forgotten and is little understood. Piracyexplores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first. Written with a historian's flair for narrative and sparkling detail, the book swarms throughout with characters of genius, principle, cunning, and outright criminal intent: in the wars over piracy, it is the victimsfrom Charles Dickens to Bob Dylanwho have always been the best known, but the principal playersthe pirates themselveshave long languished in obscurity, and it istheirstories especially that Johns brings to life in these vivid pages. 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 commerceand 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.

Author Biography

Adrian Johns is professor of history and chair of the Committee on Conceptual and Historical Studies of Science at the University of Chicago.

Table of Contents

A General History of the Pirates	p. 1
The Invention of Piracy	p. 17
The Piratical Enlightenment	p. 41
Experimenting with Print	p. 57
Pharmaceutical Piracy and the Origins of Medical Patenting	p. 83
Of Epics and Orreries	p. 109
The Land without Property	p. 145
Making a Nation	p. 179
The Printing Counterrevolution	p. 213
Inventors, Schemers, and Men of Science	p. 247
International Copyright and the Science of Civilization	p. 291
The First Pirate Hunters	p. 327
The Great Oscillation War	p. 357
Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science	p. 401
The Pirate at Home and at Large	p. 431
From Phreaking to Fudding	p. 463
Past, Present, and Future	p. 497
Acknowledgments	p. 519
Notes	p. 523
Index	p. 593
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