ADRIAN JOHNS. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates

Abstract

Adrian Johns concludes his monumental work by predicting “the end of intellectual property itself” (p. 498). In seventeen chapters, he moves across an impressive span of time, from the 1680s and the first use of the word “pirate” to describe violators of the Stationers' Register held by the Restoration Guild of Stationers, via the “piratical Enlightenment” fed by unlicensed reprinting in Ireland and America, taking in international intellectual property treaties, through the late nineteenth-century raids on pirate printers of sheet music, and finally to the world of telecommunications in the twentieth century and the internet in the twenty-first. He shows how patents and copyrights have historically been deployed to protect commercial interests rather than to reward individual inventors and writers or to stimulate innovation, and he ends the book by suggesting that we are about to experience “a profound shift in the relation between creativity and commerce” (p. 498). This profound shift is the result of a new technology. The author argues that the “dynamic, innovative global internet” is fundamentally and structurally opposed to copyright and anti-piracy legislation designed to protect intellectual property. While the problem we face in the early twenty-first century is not the same as the one faced by our predecessors in the eighteenth, nineteenth, or even twentieth centuries, there are, as Johns shows, parallels and harbingers in these earlier periods. Dynamism, innovation, and commercial entrepreneurism have been in constant and often fertile conflict with regulation and control for centuries. Indeed, Johns suggests that it is out of this conflict that a modern concept of “intellectual property” was born, in or around the late eighteenth century. His book demonstrates how the conflict persists to this day in a restless and unceasing unpicking and re-knitting of the stretchy fabric of which intellectual property is fashioned.