Today, February 1, you can get Piracy, Adrian Johns latest book, free as an e-book from the University of Chicago Press: Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates. "[Johns] traces the tensions between authorized and unauthorized producers and distributors of books, music, and other intellectual property in British and American culture from the 17th century to the present. . . . The shifting theoretical arguments about copyright and authorial property are presented in a cogent and accessible manner. Johns's research stands as an important reminder that today's intellectual property crises are not unprecedented, and offers a survey of potential approaches to a solution." —Publishers Weekly
From a Short Review at New Scientist:
You might think that prior to the 20th century, “piracy” only referred to nautical shenanigans. But English stationers in the 17th century labelled colleagues who printed unauthorised versions of other people’s work “land-pirats”.
Adrian Johns’s weighty history fills the years since with quotable anecdotes and lively portraits of wily information thieves who copied everything from telephone network codes to an entire electronics company.
[Snip]
Now, Johns sees Google’s move to digitise the world’s books and the growing open access movement in science publishing as hints that we are on the brink of an intellectual-property revolution. Plus ça change.
From the University of Chicago Press Catalog Entry:
Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’s book ultimately argues that piracy has always stood at the center of our attempts to reconcile creativity and commerce—and that piracy has been an engine of social, technological, and intellectual innovations as often as it has been their adversary.
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