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By Root 2099 0

back to London, and finally to Americ a, trying to sell weaponry in support of an ideology of free trade and open seas.11 With laissez-faire doctrines, ideologies of enlightenment, and the rise of empires and industries, what had previously been broadly consensual measures like registration and patents came to be seen as unnatural and impolitic constraints on behalf of local interests. The French Revolution saw this conviction reach its climax with the outright abolition of literary property. But in the postrevolutionary decades nations reasserted their interests. They competed to establish stricter authorial regimes, which must then be reconciled across borders. Such reconciliation became the project of much of the nineteenth century. What was happening, in effect, was a prolonged process of transformation in the relation between literary and manufacturing privileges and political space. At the height of the industrial age, the Berne and Paris Conventions would signal this by creating the first international rules for what was now called "intellectual property"

The modern intellectual property police originated at that time. But they emerged less by a renunciation of earlier practices than by their recreation. The music industry exemplified this. As private detective agencies in general boomed, its commander in chief, Arthur Preston, recruited his own antipirate force from ex police officers and dispersed them across the land. Their activities skirted illegality- as they had to in order to have any prospect of success. Constitutional complaints bloomed, with a similar tone to those prompted by the booksellers' conspiracy a century and a half earlier. Against the invasion of homes and the threatening of street vendors, a "People's Music Publishing Company" could readily justify what it was doing in terms of facing down a high-handed monopoly. Legally, the pirate king at its head had no case; but that was not the point. Making the law work consistently with liberal society was more at stake than settling what the law was. That would remain a principal focus of concern in the new century as the techniques of antipiracy proliferated and allowed electromagnetic surveillance (the detector van) to supplement sharp-eyed men on the doorstep.

Well-funded and enduring antipiracy forces began to appear in the media industries in the 195os-196os. They came into their own once again in the era of home taping. The MPAAhad a standing office by 1975, staffed by ex FBI officers, and at the end of the 1970s the RIAA contributed about $ioo,ooo to fund Bureau investigations into record piracy. Dozens of raids, hundreds of arrests, and thousands of seizures took place. By 1982, when the Betamax case was at its height, the MPAAs unit had an annual budget of $ io million to fight video piracy alone.12 From that point the private policing of intellectual property took off, in concert with the biggest boom in private security, policing, and military companies since the Victorian era. In the United Kingdom, the same year saw the British Videogram Association, the Society of Film Distributors, and the MPAA join forces to establish the Federation Against Copyright Theft (FACT). FACT then vigorously pursued its own actions against pirates, relying on so-called Anton Piller Orders to garner evidence by recruiting informers. These were provisions by which a high court judge gave investigators search and seizure rights, secretly and without representation for their suspects. That is, they recreated the privilege that early modern guild officers had enjoyed, and that Preston's men had assumed to their cost.13 FACT obtained more than a hundred Piller orders in the second half of 1982 alone. Only when an impertinent Luton pirate chose to contest one was the practice curtailed. At that point, Westminster promptly passed a law making record piracy a criminal offense, and therefore giving the regular police search and seizure powers in its pursuit.

The other pivotal development of this period was the embrace of antipirate technologies. One of FACT's earliest