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For David.

And it is, it is a glorious thing To be a Pirate King!

i i A General History of the Pirates i

2 The Invention of Piracy 17

3 The Piratical Enlightenment 41

4 Experimenting with Print 57

5 Pharmaceutical Piracy and the Origins of Medical Patenting 83

6 6 Of Epics and Orreries io9

7 The Land without Property 145

8 Making a Nation 179

9 The Printing Counterrevolution 213

io Inventors, Schemers, and Men of Science 247

11 International Copyright and the Science of Civilization 291

12 The First Pirate Hunters 327

13 The Great Oscillation War 357

14 Intellectual Property and the Nature of Science 401

15 The Pirate at Home and at Large 431

16 From Phreaking to Fudding 463

17 Past, Present, and Future 497

Acknowledgments 519

Notes 523

Index 593

In mid-2004, executives at the Tokyo headquarters of the huge electronics multinational NEC began to hear reports that its products were being counterfeited and sold in Chinese stores. Nobody was at all surprised. Reports of this kind were routine for any corporation of NEC's size and reach, and in this case they initially seemed to concern small stuff-blank DVDs and the like. The company nevertheless moved swiftly to put into action its standard response in such cases, hiring a firm called International Risk to look into the matter. There was no reason to suspect that this would prove to be anything more than yet another incident like all the others-irritating, no doubt, but impossible to suppress entirely. Piracy of this kind was the unavoidable price of doing business on a global scale.

Two years, half a dozen countries, and several continents later, what International Risk had unveiled shocked even the most jaded experts in today's industrial shenanigans. They revealed not just a few streetwise DVD pirates, but an entire parallel NEC organization. As the real company's senior vice president ruefully remarked, the pirates had "attempted to completely assume the NEC brand." Their version, like the original, was multinational and highly professional. Its agents carried business cards. They were even recruited publicly by what looked like legitimate advertising.' The piratical firm had not only replicated existing NEC goods, but actively invested in research and development to devise its own. Over time, it had produced an entire range of consumer products, from MP3 players to lavish home theater systems. These goods were of high quality, with warranties emulating NEC's own (in fact, the conspiracy came to light only when users tried to exercise their warranty rights by contacting NEC). To manufacture them the impostor multinational had signed royalty arrangements with more than fifty businesses scattered through China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, at least some of which seemed to believe they were working for the real NEC. And it had developed its own sophisticated distribution networks, allowing its products to reach a global market extending at least as far as Africa and Europe. If this was indeed, as the international press called it, the "next step in pirating," then it was a very dramatic and impressive step indeed.2

When news of the pirate NEC broke in mid-2006, the story quickly winged its way across the Internet. Readers and commentators in the blogosphere reproduced the original press reports many times over. They expressed dismay at the implications. But their dismay was often accompanied by a drop of schadenfreude. Now, they realized, none of them could really be confident that the "NEC" disk drives, chips, screens, or keyboards on which they were doing their blogging were what they claimed to be. Some found this ominous, because ofwhat it implied about knowledge in general in the networked world. Others acknowledged those implications but were only too happy to profess that they found them appealing: here was a gigantic corporation coming a cropper at the hands of unbranded outlaws who had proved themselves faster, nimbler, smarter. The Net's echo-chamber amplified the incident into a symbol of every cultural fear, epistemic