Piracy
The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
Piracy
The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates
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 realized—one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.
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. 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 commerce—and 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.
Read an excerpt.
640 pages | 40 halftones | 6 x 9 | © 2009
History: American History, European History
Law and Legal Studies: Legal History
Literature and Literary Criticism: American and Canadian Literature, British and Irish Literature
Reviews
Table of Contents
1. A General History of the Pirates
2. The Invention of Piracy
3. The Piratical Enlightenment
4. Experimenting with Print
5. Pharmaceutical Piracy and the Origins of Medical Patenting
6. Of Epics and Orreries
7. The Land without Property
8. Making a Nation
9. The Printing Counterrevolution
10. Inventors, Schemers, and Men of Science
11. International Copyright and the Science of Civilization
12. The First Pirate Hunters
13. The Great Oscillation War
14. Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science
15. The Pirate at Home and at Large
16. From Phreaking to Fudding
17. Past, Present, and Future
Acknowledgments
Notes
IndexAwards
American Society for Information Science and Technology: ASIST Book of the Year Award
Won
Choice Magazine: CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Awards
Won
The University of Chicago Press: Gordon J. Laing Award
Won
History of Science Society: Watson Davis and Helen Miles Davis Prize
Short Listed/Finalist
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