Adrian Johns: Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · copyright, intellectual property, piracy
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. Written with a historian’s flair for narrative and sparkling detail, the book swarms throughout with characters of genius, principle, cunning, and outright criminal intent: in the wars over piracy, it is the victims—from Charles Dickens to Bob Dylan—who have always been the best known, but the principal players—the pirates themselves—have long languished in obscurity, and it is their stories especially that Johns brings to life in these vivid pages.
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.
Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2009
ISBN 978-0-226-40118-8, 0-226-40118-9
626 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-15)
Comment (0)Marcus Kaarto, Rasmus Fleischer (eds.): Copy Me. Samlade texter från Piratbyrån (2005) [Swedish]
Filed under book | Tags: · copyleft, copyright, filesharing, piracy, the pirate bay
“Digitaliseringen av kultur och information har utvecklats till en av vår tids stora stridsfrågor. Med en dator kan vem som helst kopiera information gratis, vilket har gjort tidigare monopolister desperata. Deras bittra nej till allt vad digital kultur heter, har skapat en onyanserad och tråkig debatt. De analoga massmedierna har fyllts av tyckare som på de mest udda sätt försöker förhålla sig till en främmande digital värld. Tidningarnas rapportering har varit ur tryckpressens perspektiv. Boken du håller i handen består däremot av texter som analogiserats från det digitala kulturlivet. Perspektiven som kommer fram är både hackerns, konstnärens, filosofens och den vanlige fildelarens. Copy Me bjuder på sågningar av kopieringsdiskussionens myter, men också visioner och praktiska exempel på ett kulturliv som för länge sedan lämnat upphovsrättens epok bakom sig. Från Public Enemy till Friedrich Hayek, från TV-spelens historia till Michel Foucault, från datornätverk till läkemedelsfabriker. För första gången i bokform och på svenska presenteras här en samling texter om en av vårt århundrades mest brännande ämnen: kopieringen.”
Publisher: Roh-Nin förlag, Stockholm, 2005
ISBN 919757970X
PDF (updated on 2018-6-8)
Internet Archive (added on 2018-6-8)
Peter T. Leeson: The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1600s, 1700s, economics, history, piracy, pirates
Pack your cutlass and blunderbuss–it’s time to go a-pirating! The Invisible Hook takes readers inside the wily world of late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pirates. With swashbuckling irreverence and devilish wit, Peter Leeson uncovers the hidden economics behind pirates’ notorious, entertaining, and sometimes downright shocking behavior. Why did pirates fly flags of Skull & Bones? Why did they create a “pirate code”? Were pirates really ferocious madmen? And what made them so successful? The Invisible Hook uses economics to examine these and other infamous aspects of piracy. Leeson argues that the pirate customs we know and love resulted from pirates responding rationally to prevailing economic conditions in the pursuit of profits.
The Invisible Hook looks at legendary pirate captains like Blackbeard, Black Bart Roberts, and Calico Jack Rackam, and shows how pirates’ search for plunder led them to pioneer remarkable and forward-thinking practices. Pirates understood the advantages of constitutional democracy–a model they adopted more than fifty years before the United States did so. Pirates also initiated an early system of workers’ compensation, regulated drinking and smoking, and in some cases practiced racial tolerance and equality. Leeson contends that pirates exemplified the virtues of vice–their self-seeking interests generated socially desirable effects and their greedy criminality secured social order. Pirates proved that anarchy could be organized.
Revealing the democratic and economic forces propelling history’s most colorful criminals, The Invisible Hook establishes pirates’ trailblazing relevance to the contemporary world.
Publisher Princeton University Press, 2009
ISBN 0691137471, 9780691137476
Length 271 pages