Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [2]
Implicit in that resigned lament is a recognition that information has indeed become a principal foundation of modern social, economic, and cultural order. As it has become the key commodity in the globalized economy, so control and management of information have vastly increased in overt importance. In the nineteenth century, manufacturing held the key to economic power; for much of the twentieth, energy occupied that position. Now knowledge and imaginative creativity seem to be challenging for primacy. Piracy is the biggest threat in this emerging economic order, and it is commonly represented as the biggest threat to it. A specter is haunting Europe, as a latter-day Engels might have written. Only it is not just Europe that is spooked, but the entire economic world; and the ghost looming before us is not a communist, but a pirate.5
Yet the problem is even thornier than that may imply, because it is not reducible to any kind of informational class war. The pirates, in all too many cases, are not alienated proles. Nor do they represent some comfortingly distinct outsider. They are us. Biotechnology companies certainly complain about seed piracy, for example-but also find themselves confronted by protests at their own alleged "biopiracy."The same charge is liberally hurled at high-tech "pharmers" in the West-the word here referring not to unscrupulous forgers of Web sites but to highly credentialed bioscientists and ethnobotanists traversing the tropics in their search for new medicines. In such cases, the institutions of scientific and medical research on which we depend are being denounced as pirates not for destroying intellectual property, but precisely for introducing it to places where it did not previously exist. It sometimes seems that there is only one charge that all players in the globalization game, from radical environmentalists to officials of the World Trade Organization, level at their respective foes, and that charge is piracy. Marking the repudiation of information capitalism at one extreme and its consummation at the other, it has become the definitive transgression of the information age.
This makes piracy a compelling subject as well as an attractive one. Its consequences extend beyond particular cases, and beyond even the law itself, to impinge on the basic ways in which ideas and technologies are created, distributed, and used. Conflicts over piracy involve strongly held ideals of authorship, creativity, and reception. Society can therefore find itself forced to articulate and defend those ideals, and sometimes to adjust or abandon them. That is the common thread that ties together all our most important piracy debates, whether the specific allegations relate to gene patents, software, proprietary drugs, books, ballet steps, or digital downloading. What is at stake, in the end, is the nature of the relationship we want to uphold between creativity, communication, and commerce. And the history of piracy constitutes a centuries-long series of conflictsextending back by some criteria to the origins of recorded civilization itself- that have shaped this relationship. Those conflicts challenged assumptions of authenticity and required active measures to secure it. They provoked reappraisals of creative authorship and its prerogatives. They demanded that customs of reception be stipulated and enforced. Above all, they forced contemporaries to articulate the properties and powers of communications technologies themselves - the printing press, the steam press, radio, television, and, now, the Internet.
Yet setting out to rescue the history of piracy from obscurity may still seem a quixotic quest. While its present and future receive daily attention in the mass media, its past remains almost completely veiled. To be sure, a few isolated episodes are cited repeatedly: