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By Root 2131 0

we often find ourselves in the province of conventions and customs rather than laws, and those conventions and customs sometimes originated long ago. Their impact has been great and lasting even though they long remained largely unwritten. The most important case in point is that of the so-called courtesies that arose in the early modern book trade to govern what was then called "propriety." All civilized book trade members were supposed to honor these customary principles. They pervaded the realm of print, and shaped that realm along with the more formal practices of licensing, patenting, and registration. Although they had little, if any, legal weight, there is ample evidence that they were respected by printers and booksellers and seen as a basis for harmony in their community. To breach them was not just to violate a particular rule but to dishonor print itself When contentions over patenting and registration led to the invention of piracy, therefore, the book trade attempted repeatedly to counter the new offense by appealing to its courtesies and updating them. Piracy and propriety evolved together as they did so. The effects of courtesies would persist long after they themselves had retreated from prominence, either by being abandoned or by becoming second nature. Early broadcasting, recording, and digital media all inherited elements from them, and defenders of digital piracy today sometimes unwittingly adopt arguments that descend from the courtesies of Milton's age.

It is fascinating to consider in this light what it takes to become an expert reader (or viewer, or listener) in a piratical environment. What skills equip someone for that role? In some circumstances, the most disturbing thing for authors and owners is that it requires no special skills at all. Reading a piracy may be exactly the same as reading an authorized work. The implications of piracy in such cases are huge precisely because for the user, at least, the fact of a work's being pirated makes no difference. This sometimes (but not always) seems to have been taken as true in the eighteenth century, for example, when unauthorized reprints spread enlightenment across Europe. That is interesting because the reprints could in fact differ quite markedly from their originals, and occassionally readers exhibited quite sophisticated forensic skills in appraising degress of authenticity. The same goes for today's global economy. I know from experience that one watches a DVD of Fanny andAlexander bought from a street vendor in Beijing without fearing that one may be missing something aesthetically essential, even though the next disk in the pile may turn out to be a completely spurious imposter. In other instances, however, the practices of reception been very different. Think of what it meant in the i96os for Londoners to tune their transistor radios to pirate radio-casual, commercial, and pop-focused-rather than to the offical, safe, and staid Light Programme of the BBC.13 Fidelity of reproductionthe ability to replicate an original to agiven degree of accuracy-is clearly not all-important. Piracy in practice is a matter of the history of reception as well as production.

It is a matter of the geography of those practices too. Piracy has always been a matter of place-of territory and geopolitics-as well as time. Early modern English law, for example, came close to defining an illicit book by the location of its manufacture. Legitimate volumes were printed in the worker's own home; any printed outside the home were suspect. On a larger scale, until the nineteenth century reprinting a book outside the jurisdiction of its initial publication was perfectly legitimate, as long as the reprint remained outside. The flourishing reprint industries that grew up in eighteenth-century Ireland, Switzerland, and Austria-and that provided for that extensive distribution on which the Enlightenment depended-were entirely aboveboard. As soon as it was reimported, however, the same book became a piracy. That is, piracy was a property not of objects alone, but of objects in