Piracy_ The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates - Adrian Johns [250]
To calm those passions we need a different historical understanding of science. Until the recent rise of the life sciences, the received view was that the epochal episode in modern science was the Manhattan Project. Out of that project came big science and the postwar institutions of the NSF and NIH. While it would be absurd to deny the importance of the bomb, it is nonetheless the case that an alternative view is conceivable.60 On this view, the history of modern science would turn not on physics, nor even on biology, but on communication and computation. Such a recalibration would involve revising the chronology, focus, problems, and sources of the historyofmodern science. Its epochal moment would come earlier, with broadcasting and long-distance telephony in the 1920S. Its central problems would involve the changing character of the scientist and the fate of scientific norms amid the emergence of corporate, teambased, and managerial science. The vexed story of patenting and its enemies would offer away both ofgetting at this history and of apprehending its importance. Ifwe want to get out of hell, this may be one possible exit route.
In the last quarter of the twentieth century piracy was at once domesticated and globalized. It was the occasion, on the one hand, of sleepless nights for suburban parents harried by the recording industry interested in their children's file sharing. On the other hand, it became a perennial bone of contention in the geopolitics of world trade. Together those two trends marked the entrenchment of information as a structural element of late modern life. Digitization, with its promise of perfect copyinginevitably dubbed "cloning"-accentuated this process. But it did not begin it, and it did not determine its nature. What did were perceptions, practices, and convictions that had coalesced earlier-sometimes much earlier. They came into sharp focus during the 197os and i98os, ready to be put to use when a digital revolution became an imminent prospect. What brought them together was a practice that spread rapidly from being a niche activity of hobbyists and aficionados to a mass phenomenon. It had its own moral economy. It inspired real devotion, and, in consequence, affected how the new digital devices would be put to use. Many called it home piracy.
Piracy has frequently cast the political status of the home into sharp relief. From the seventeenth century to the twentieth, controversies repeatedly rested on perceptions of what went on in homes and expectations of what should go on in them. Piracy conflicts demanded some specification of the roles of home and state in creativity and commerce. They also required some account of how to police domestic activities in a liberal democracy. But home copying terrified the culture industries in their formative years of the mid-twentieth century more than prior piracies because it implied a radical decentralization of cultural production. What made this possibility plausible was the reception accorded to one of the technologies appropriated byAmerica from the ruins of Nazi Germany: magnetic tape. Reel-to-reel tape machines became a presence in many U.S. households by the late 1940s. Although cumbersome by the standards of later incarnations, they made recording and copying far easier than they had ever been before. As domestic habits of use developed, they made it possible to visualize a revolutionary shift occurring in the place of reproduction, and even creation, from factory to home. Or perhaps it would be better to call it a counterrevolutionary shift, because before the Industrial Revolution all such work had taken place in household settings. At any rate, the cheapness, portability, and reusability of tape made it a perfect vehicle for communities that were already seeking some such tool-communities like that of amateur radio experimenters, for example.' It was conducive to their moral commitments to exchange,