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By Root 1893 0

they might be assisted by the various relay or wired-broadcast operations that arose in the 1930s and, the BBC feared, mixed its programming with that of commercial rivals. The BBC's first chief engineer, Peter Eckersley, championed a grand national scheme for wired broadcasting after he was forced from the corporation for being cited in a divorce-a scheme that was inspired in part by Secret Wireless's ambitions in the twenties. But he did so in hopes of providing a media vehicle for the British fascist Sir Oswald Mosley, who was secretly his employer. At any rate, the practices of pirate listening undermined the BBC's prized concept of "balance," which, as the economist Ronald Coase demonstrated in his powerful mid-century critique, had always been its real raison d'etre.75

That put in question the nature of broadcasting as a medium. In a realm of listener piracy, the messages put out might differ radically from those being received. Pirate listening threatened to create a nation of autonomous, individualized agents -modern Menocchios, as it were, ready and able to listen as unpredictably as the now-famous Italian miller had read in the sixteenth century.76 Just as the rediscovery of Menocchio later forced a profound reexamination of the nature of print and the power of the page over readers, so the discovery of pirate listening militates against the early, utopian vision of broadcasting as producing a modern enlightenment. And at the time, too, the ideal of a nation of responsible, selfimproving listeners leaked away through the cracks created by this form of piracy As it did so, it made way for very different ideals-ideals of heterogeneity that in succeeding decades would shape the politics of media, communication, and information itself.

Piracy was central to the emergence of the information society. This was true not just in the obvious sense that radio pioneers pirated each others' inventions and unauthorized transmitters competed for bandwidth. At a broader and deeper level, the identification of new forms of piracyand the actions taken to fight them-required articulating what mass communication and information themselves would be in a democratic society. That imperative affected no aspect of modern culture more, perhaps, than the definitive enterprise of Western industrial society: science. In the mid-twentieth century, disputes over piracy and intellectual property triggered a reappraisal of the relation between research and the common good. A distinct vision of the scientific enterprise-its nature, purpose, legitimacy, and authority- came into being as a result. It proved immensely influential. In the postwar years it was put into action to shape the administrative and institutional structures of the sciences. It continues to shape what we ourselves take science to be.

One reason why this matters is that the nature and place of science now seem remarkably unstable once again. Among the more prominent convictions about science in our own world is that, just as it has become global in scope, so it has obliterated long-honored boundaries between public and private, between interest and disinterest, and between academy and industry. Science seems to tunnel through the gothic walls of academia with greater ease than ever before. Intellectual property is the engine that drives it to do so. Patents "incentivize" inventive originality, claim supporters-and annual increases in the number filed apparently testify to their success in doing so. For antagonists, a "rush" to patent is a corrupting force at the heart of scientific culture. As proprietary conventions flow "upstream" from the commercial world to pollute-such language is quite common-that of research proper, so biomedicine in particular is portrayed as betraying an older tradition of "open science." I And if science simply is open knowledge, then science itself is in peril. Meanwhile, it goes without saying that many see an explosion taking place in the extent, scope, and volume of piracy accusations swirling around the sciences. This conjunction explains