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...
A discussion with Jerry Brito of The Mercatus Center at George Mason University on the history of intellectual property and piracy, the origins of copyright law in London, the first pirates, and today’s digital piracy....
Adrian Johns talked about his book Piracy: Intellectual Property Wars from Guttenberg to Gates (University Of Chicago Press, 2010). He was interviewed in the Digitally Lit Room II of the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Lit...
Fred von Lohmann at the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls Piracy “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.”
So, for example, in the eighteenth century metropolitan publishers fought against provincial and international “pirates” to preserve their claims to a perpetual “literary property” in printed works. Their clashes defined and publicized what became central...
Piracy is not peculiar to the digital revolution—a revolution that is in any case pervaded by historical inheritances. Nor is it a mere accessory to the development of legal doctrine. Yet neither is it an offense of timeless character, universally definable by a priori criteria. It is far richer and trickier than that.