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By Root 2211 0

tourism boom that accompanied the Great Exhibition of 1851. Their vehicles were soon popularly termed "pirate" buses; a musichall song called The pirate bus was popular for a while in the late Victorian era. They remained a presence on the city's streets beyond World War 11.8 Only by stretching the term "intellectual property" to breaking point could a pirate bus fit the orthodox definition. To exclude such usages, however, would rob us of the opportunity to consider what pirate buses had in common with pirate radio, pirate publishing, and pirate listening -three other kinds of piracy that were also popularly recognized in the period, and which we shall encounter later. By the same token, a doctrinaire definition might actually force us to count as piratical certain instances of expropriation that contemporaries did not identify in this way. An obvious example would be America's wholesale redistribution of foreign companies' patents (those of allies as well as the defeated Germans) after World War I. The legality of this hugely important move was unclear, but few in the United States, at least, would have called it piracy

This is an apparent problem that can be turned to real advantage. It is certainly true that the nature of piracy has changed over time. For that reason, we need to respect its historical meanings rather than imposing its current one on our ancestors. Accordingly, some person, thing, or act has to have been characterized as piratical by contemporaries themselves in order for it to count as such in this book. But at the same time, we cannot simply take such characterizations at face value. Those who were called pirates almost never did: they always repudiated the label as inaccurate and unjust. The point is that when they did so, they often triggered debates that threw light on major structural issues and had major consequences as a result. We can profit by focusing on precisely these contests -and the more prolonged, variegated, and ferocious they were, the better. They strained relations between creativity and commercial life, and at critical moments caused them to be reconstituted. The history of piracy is the history of those transformations. Every time we ourselves buy a book, download a file, or listen to a radio show, our actions rest on it.

PIRACY AND THE PRINTING REVOLUTION

The period of time that we need to traverse is a long one, but it is not indefinitely long. For although appropriators of ideas may always have existed, societies have not always recognized a specific concept of intellectual piracy. Far from being timeless, that concept is in fact not even ancient. It arose in the context of Western Europe in the early modern periodthe years of religious and political upheaval surrounding the Reformation and the scientific revolution. In particular, it owed its origin to the cultural transformations set in train byJohann Gutenberg's invention of the printing press. At the origin of the history of piracy thus lies one of the defining events of Western civilization.

Printing posed serious problems of politics and authority for the generations following Gutenberg. It was in the process ofgrapplingwith those problems that they came up with the notion of piracy At their heart was the question of how to conform the new enterprise to their existing societies. For, following Gutenberg's first trials in Mainz in the mid-fifteenth century, printing had spread rapidly to the major European cities. It was a rapidly expanding and potentially revolutionary activity, and it would eventually inaugurate a transformation in practices of authorship, communication, and reading. But in the shorter term, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, contemporaries could and did findways to apprehend the press in terms relatively familiar to them. At the heart of printing, as they saw it, was a practical activity-a craft. It was a fast-growing and in some ways extraordinary one, to be sure, but it was still a craft nonetheless. And that suggested how it could be accommodated.

Early modern people knew how crafts should