Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

From P2P Foundation
Jump to navigation Jump to search

Book: Adrian Johns. Piracy. The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. University of Chicago Press, 2010

URL = http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226401188


Description

"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. 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 victims—from Charles Dickens to Bob Dylan—who have always been the best known, but the principal players—the pirates themselves—have long languished in obscurity, and it is their stories especially that Johns brings to life in these vivid pages." (http://www.press.uchicago.edu/presssite/metadata.epl?isbn=9780226401188)


Reviews

1. Fred von Lohmann:

"I've just finished Adrian Johns' 2009 book, Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, a 500+ page magnum opus stretching from the 1600s to the present. Johns is a noted University of Chicago historian, and his book is a fascinating and essential read for anyone interested in the history of the term "intellectual property" and development of the modern copyright and patent systems.

A warning to readers: you may not want to start at the beginning, unless you're really interested in the organization of pre-industrial printing in England in the 1700s. Because the book is organized chronologically, the first several chapters are, well, a bit less accessible.

So here's my advice: start with Chapter 13, which is about the rise of radio in the UK in the 1920s. Turns out that history is remarkably relevant today. Radio arose in the shadow of a patent thicket, became the province of tinkers, and posed a puzzle for a government worried that "experimenters" would ruin things by mis-adjusting their sets and flooding the ether with howling oscillation. Many will immediately recognize the parallels to modern controversies about iPhone "jailbreaking," user innovation, and the future of the Internet.

The momentum of Chapter 13 should carry you through to the end of the book. Along the way, you'll be reminded that today's debates have historical roots in controversies over computer hacking, phone phreaking, home taping, and ultimately the 1920s patent-law rebellions against AT&T. This is history every interested copy-fighter, patent reformer, and netizen needs to know. Prof. Johns ends his book by describing the unique thing about our current historical moment: the rise of what he calls an "intellectual property defense industry" (http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2010/05/adrian-johns-i-piracy-i-essential-history-lessons)


2. Jeffrey Rosen:

"In his invaluable book "Piracy," Adrian Jones argues that the tendency of intellectual property battles to undermine privacy is not new. On the contrary, Johns, a history professor at the University of Chicago, 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.

After the first printing press arrived in England around 1471, intellectual property rights in books were enforced in two ways -- through monopolies granted by the crown or through guild registration with a Company of Stationers charged with punishing violators who reprinted books without permission. From the beginning there was a strong geographical dimension to printing: Legitimate, properly registered books were supposed to be published in respectable printing houses or homes, while reprinted, pirate copies, such as seditious books criticizing the crown, were said to be published by "private" presses -- in "holes" or "corners" hidden from respectable society. The right to search a printing house was crucially important to enforcing intellectual property rights, but constables of the crown didn't enjoy that privilege. Instead, self-policing by members of the guild ensured against invasive searches: A guild member who authorized the search of a fellow printer's house was likely to be investigated himself by the same printer in return.

In the late 18th century, London booksellers -- threatened by Scottish and Irish reprinters who pirated their books -- tried to extend this system of self-policing throughout the United Kingdom. They asserted a kind of perpetual literary property, rooted in the customs of the trade and policed by their own corps of roving agents. This gambit dramatically backfired when challenged by the "pirate in chief," a Scottish reprinter named Alexander Donaldson, who claimed that the asserted right of private agents to snoop in private homes threatened the public sphere. In 1774, in the most important copyright case in Anglo-American legal history, the British House of Lords sided with Donaldson and rejected the idea of a perpetual copyright. The pirates had successfully cast themselves as defenders of free speech, privacy and the public domain.

Johns shows how a similar pattern recurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1902, music pirates took advantage of a revolutionary process that allowed for the exact copying of sheet music, which they sold far more cheaply than the original publishers did. The sheet music companies successfully lobbied the government for a dramatic strengthening of copyright law -- one that many people saw as a threat to civil liberties. It allowed the police, on the request of a piracy victim, to seize illicit sheet music without first getting a warrant. The law didn't allow forced entry into houses, since it assumed that pirated sheet music was sold on the streets, but after a few high-profile raids, the pirates began to portray themselves, in court and in the newspapers, as "heroic defenders of domestic privacy." And when the British government, in an effort to combat radio piracy in the 1920s, said that the right to enter homes was the key to maintaining the state's "control of the ether," critics responded that abolishing the radio would be better than forfeiting liberty.

In the course of describing these intellectual and economic battles, Jones includes memorable stories of a variety of Pirate Kings, such as Matthew Carey, the 19th-century American pirate and economic nationalist who campaigned for the free reprinting of European pamphlets. He was so single-minded that his son denounced him for allowing his cause to destroy his family, leading Carey to accuse his son of "filial treason" and challenge him to a duel.

Johns ends with an insightful chapter describing how the old battles between property, piracy and privacy are being replayed today. The debate over Google's book-scanning project recalls Enlightenment-era attempts to create a universal library through mandatory book depository laws, debates over pharmaceutical patenting were anticipated in the Victorian era, and the file-sharers of today resemble the home-tapers of the 1960s.

Now that digital rights management technology has the capacity to invade the privacy of the home far more dramatically than the constables of old, and now that the U.S. government has alarmingly committed its enforcement powers to uphold corporate property rights in ways that are even more invasive to domestic privacy, Johns suggests rethinking the distinctions that have defined the intellectual property wars for centuries. He criticizes as obsolete the distinction between literary creativity, which is regulated by copyright, and mechanical creativity, which is regulated by patents. A modern taxonomy, Johns suggests, might focus on the distinction between digital and analog copies or -- even more radically -- recognize multiple categories of material regulated by different legal regimes: "genetic, digital, algorithmic, inscribed, and more." Although "more complex in theory," this system might be simpler to use in practice, because it would more closely reflect the "contours of creative life." Since "the history of piracy is the history of modernity," Johns concludes in this challenging, richly detailed and provocative book, the choices we make about how to balance property, creativity and privacy will define "the contours of creative life" for the 21st century." (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/07/02/AR2010070202277.html)