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By Root 2224 0

sharing, and distributed creativity. And that had practical implications. It was relatively straightforward to defend a principle of intellectual property in a world of industrial copying, because such copying took place in policeable places. But once those imperatives became both domestic and universal, intellectual property itself would come in for fresh skepticism.

HOME PIRACY

That piracy, broadly construed, should occur in the home is nothing new. Print pirates worked out of London's houses in the seventeenth century, sheet-music pirates dealt out their copies of popular songs by the thousand from terrace houses in Liverpool and Manchester in the i9oos, and listener pirates could be detected in their homes in the 192os. Yet such a thing as "home piracy" always seemed counterintuitive. This remained true in the i96os and 1970s. European and American authorities alike consistently attempted to distinguish "home copying" or "home taping" from piracyper se. Piracy, they insisted, was a commercial enterprise, and therefore not domestic. "Private" taping was for personal use, or at most for sharing among a few friends on a noncommercial basis. But as the practice proliferated, so that distinction eroded. In the presentations of industry lawyers, in the less cautious statements of trade associations, and above all in the press, "home piracy" became a reality for the first time. The taping of radio broadcasts, then records, and finally television programs and movies came to be called piratical whether or not it had market motives. By the late 19706 the music industry was describing it as the greatest threat it had ever faced- an existential peril that might destroy music itself. That rhetoric would later be reiterated by Hollywood and the broadcasters with the advent of VCRs, and the entertainment industry en masse with the coming of digital networks. What many citizens saw as an inoffensive practice-indeed, a constructive one, around which sociability cohered, and from which new art emerged-took on ominous significance. Every time they pressed record, citizens were told, they contributed to "the death of music."

The history of the home itself inflected the meaning of this proclaimed piracy in two principal ways. The first had to do with understandings of moral and political order. The household had long been accounted the essential unit out ofwhich society was formed. Since early modern times, the political nation had been construed as a huge concatenation of households. Moreover, the household was reckoned a peculiarly powerful site of moral proprietywhen most crafts and trades were carried on there. The craft or retail space on the ground floor of a Renaissance city building had been a mixed space, combining the public world of the street and the private one of the home. The guardianship of the patriarch extended from the family to manufacturing and commercial conduct across this space. Books, as we have seen, were made and sold under that authority; but so were all other goods. Many cases inwhich seditious or libelous books were prosecuted in the early modern period hung on the distinctions between parts of the house: who could go into particular rooms and what they could do there. Surreptitious, illegal, or simply bad work was associated with other spaces. It might happen upstairs, in the definitively private part of the house, which implied concealment. Or it might go on outside the house altogether, in "corners" or "holes"-language that still cropped up in descriptions of radio piracy at the early BBC. This implied something dangerous, or otherwise unfit for family morality' Of course, pirate printing did in fact happen in conventional printing houses, but when it did contemporaries struggled a little to grasp its nature. They often portrayed the households in question as disordered, to the point of not being true homes at all. They might be topsy-turvy, with servants lording it over masters; or riddled with adultery, as reputedly with some of the more notorious Whig and Tory printers of the Restoration. Samuel Richardson's