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...
It is hard to see how the situation can be resolved satisfactorily without changing the very terms in which society understands intellectual property and its policing. That is, history suggests that a radical reconfiguration of what we now call intellectual property may be approaching, driven on by antipiracy measures as much as by piracy itself.