» Tuesday, 28 September A.D. 2010

on piracy

I've started reading Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns recently, and I've found it to be engrossing reading. Granted, I'm only 40 pages in, but the story so far has been great. The NEC brandjacking story at the beginning of the book boggles the mind.

I have also been suitably chastised with regards to the word “piracy.” Long ago, a more ignorant version of myself was much impressed with GNU's suggestion to avoid various words, one of which is “piracy”; I will quote their reasoning here:

Publishers often refer to copying they don't approve of as “piracy.” In this way, they imply that it is ethically equivalent to attacking ships on the high seas, kidnapping and murdering the people on them. Based on such propaganda, they have procured laws in most of the world to forbid copying in most (or sometimes all) circumstances. (They are still pressuring to make these prohibitions more complete.)

If you don't believe that copying not approved by the publisher is just like kidnapping and murder, you might prefer not to use the word “piracy” to describe it. Neutral terms such as “unauthorized copying” (or “prohibited copying” for the situation where it is illegal) are available for use instead. Some of us might even prefer to use a positive term such as “sharing information with your neighbor.”

I think it is fair to say that one might come away from reading this with the expectation that this appropriation of “piracy” is a recent doing. A younger, idealistic version of myself might be forgiven for wanting to fight back against the media companies's propaganda campaign. However, Piracy states:

When and where exactly did people begin to refer to intellectual purloining as piracy? The answer is clearer than one might suppose. It is easy to establish that the usage emerged in English before it did in other European languages. It is more difficult to establish the exact moment the term was coined, but it seems clear that it occurred some time in the mid-seventeenth century. In around 1600 piracy seems not to have carried this meaning at all, except on a few isolated occasions as a metaphor...

At the other end of the century, however, piracy suddenly appears everywhere. It is prominent in the writing of Defoe, Swift, Addison, Gay, Congreve, Ward, and Pope, and pirate suddenly starts to be defined in dictionaries as “one who unjustly prints another person's copy.” Very soon after that, it can be seen invoked in learned or medical contentions...And dictionaries of other European languages published in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries then show the term spreading — first to France, then to Italy, and at length to Germany too...

So if Johns is to be believed, the usage of the word is not exactly a new phenomenon—we've been using it as a synonym for unauthorized copying for several centuries now. Definitely not a late twentieth century invention; probably a little late to turn back the clock. Also worthwhile to note that the term appears to have been introduced/popularized by the writers, not the publishers—though the publishers probably had an opinion.

Johns goes on to write about the origins of “piracy”:

Ancient writers bequeathed two principal associations of the word pirate. Pirates were seagoing thieves, certainly. But there was more to them than that. They were irritants to the civilized order itself. Their very existence amounted to a test of that order. Cicero, for example, invoked the pirate as his ur-criminal — he who declined even the honor that supposedly obtained among thieves. The thing about pirates, for Cicero, was that they lay beyond all society. They had no set place, and owed no customary allegiance to legitimate authority. Their existence required that society distinguish itself and its conduct from all that they did...Indeed, it was their sheer unsociability that for him seemed the defining characteristic of pirates...

I think the people in pirate parties would not necessarily object to the second description above.

posted by Nate @ 8:56PM