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By Root 1951 0

relationships and damage others. At an extreme, they can even threaten some of the elements of modernity that we most prize, because we take them to be central to life in a decent society. Examples are not lacking of antipiracy practices that pose questions of this order, potentially as serious as those suggested by the fake NEC. When a California company sets up a spurious bit-torrent site in a bid to snare the unwary downloader, the lay observer can be forgiven for failing to see at first which is the real pirate. When a multinational media corporation quietly installs digital-rights software into its customers' computers that may render them vulnerable to Trojan horse attacks, what has happened to the customer's own property rights -not to mention privacy? When a biotechnology company employs officers who turn agents provocateurs in order to catch unwary farmers in the act of "seed piracy," one may wonder where the authenticity and accountability lie.16 It is not new for problems of privacy, accountability, autonomy, and responsibility-problems at the core of traditional politics -to be enmeshed in those of intellectual property But to account for that fact demands a specifically historical kind of insight.

In short, the nexus of creativity and commerce that has prevailed in modern times is nowadays in a predicament. Its implications begin with intellectual property, but extend far beyond intellectual property alone. They maywell foment a crisis of democratic culture itself. It is hard to see how the situation can be resolved satisfactorilywithout changing the very terms in which society understands intellectual property and its policing. That is, history suggests that a radical reconfiguration ofwhat we now call intellectual property may be approaching, driven on by antipiracy measures as much as by piracy itself Such an outcome is not inconceivable. Equally profound changes in the relation between creativity and commerce have certainly taken place before. In the eighteenth century, for example, copyright was invented, and in the nineteenth century intellectual property came into existence. A few decades from now, our successors maywell look back and see a similar transformation as looming in our own day. If we wish to delay or even forestall such an outcome-or if we hope to steer the process as it happens-then we will be wise to change the approach we take to piracy. Even to pose that possibility calls for a historical vision. A response will require us to put that vision to use.

To find the origins of intellectual piracy, the place to start is at the heart of London. Stand at the main door of St. Paul's Cathedral. Facing west, walk away from the Cathedral, heading down Ludgate and toward Fleet Street. After about a hundred yards you come upon a narrow alley leading off the street to the right. It is nondescript and easy to miss. Entering the alley, the din of the traffic quickly fades, and you find yourself in a small courtyard. A doorway at the far corner leads into a building of indeterminate age with a stone facade. You pass along a brief, twisting entranceway and into an elegant antechamber. But then the passage suddenly and dramatically opens out, leading into a vast, formal hall. It is richly decorated with seventeenth-centurypaneling and arrayed flags, all illuminated by stainedglass windows portraying Caxton, Shakespeare, Cranmer, and Tyndale. You are in Stationers' Hall, the center of London's old book trade. And here, beyond all the elegant joinery and ceremonial paraphernalia, lies the key to the emergence of piracy. It sits quietly in a modest muniments room. It is a book.

The Stationers' register is a heavy manuscript tome of some 65o pages, bound in vellum. In fact, several volumes ofwhat was along series of such registers have survived, dating from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries; but the one that matters here was made in the mid-seventeenth.' At that time, long before copyright existed, this book was the central element in a practical system for upholding order in London's commerce