Washington Post Book Reviews
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Monday July 12, 2010
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PIRACY: The Intellectual Property Wars From Gutenberg to Gates
Adrian Johns
Univ. of Chicago
ISBN 978-0226401188
626 pages
$35
Reviewed by Jeffrey Rosen
In 2008, as part of a copyright suit, a federal judge ordered Google, which owns YouTube, to turn over to Viacom the viewing records of every video watched on YouTube, including the login names and computer addresses of every viewer. One corporation's efforts to enforce intellectual property rights turned out to pose dramatic threats to the privacy of tens of millions of users. (Last month, the court summarily ruled in favor of YouTube against Viacom). And not long ago, Congress created a "copyright czar" charged with mounting a "war on piracy." That war now threatens to turn government lawyers into snoops and enforcers on behalf of corporate interests.
In his invaluable book, "Piracy," Adrian Jones argues that the tendency of intellectual property battles to undermine privacy is not new. On the contrary, Johns, a history professor at the University of Chicago, argues that ever since the medieval and Enlightenment eras, corporations have tried to defend their economic interests by searching for intellectual piracy in the private sphere of people's homes. Jones argues that all of our current debates about intellectual piracy -- from Google's efforts to create a universal digital library to the fight over how vigorous patents should be -- have antecedents in the copyright wars of earlier eras.
After the first printing press arrived in England around 1471, intellectual property rights in books were enforced in two ways -- through monopolies granted by the crown or through guild registration with a Company of Stationers charged with punishing violators who reprinted books without permission. From the beginning there was a strong geographical dimension to printing: Legitimate, properly registered books were supposed to be published in respectable printing houses or homes, while reprinted, pirate copies, such as seditious books criticizing the crown, were said to be published by "private" presses -- in "holes" or "corners" hidden from respectable society. The right to search a printing house was crucially important to enforcing intellectual property rights, but constables of the crown didn't enjoy that privilege. Instead, self-policing by members of the guild ensured against invasive searches: A guild member who authorized the search of a fellow printer's house was likely to be investigated himself by the same printer in return.
In the late 18th century, London booksellers -- threatened by Scottish and Irish reprinters who pirated their books -- tried to extend this system of self-policing throughout the United Kingdom. They asserted a kind of perpetual literary property, rooted in the customs of the trade and policed by their own corps of roving agents. This gambit dramatically backfired when challenged by the "pirate-in-chief," a Scottish reprinter named Alexander Donaldson, who claimed that the asserted right of private agents to snoop in private homes threatened the public sphere. In 1774, in the most important copyright case in Anglo-American legal history, the British House of Lords sided with Donaldson rather than the booksellers and rejected the idea of a perpetual copyright. The pirates had successfully cast themselves as defenders of free speech, privacy and the public domain.
Johns shows how a similar pattern recurred in the 19th and 20th centuries. In 1902, music pirates took advantage of a revolutionary process that allowed for the exact copying of sheet music, which they sold far more cheaply than the original publishers did. The sheet music companies successfully lobbied the government for a dramatic strengthening of copyright law -- one that many people saw as a threat to civil liberties. It allowed the police, on the request of a piracy victim, to seize illicit sheet music without first getting a warrant. The law didn't allow forced entry into houses, since it assumed that pirated sheet music was sold on the streets, but after a few high-profile raids, the pirates began to portray themselves, in court and in the newspapers, as "heroic defenders of domestic privacy." And when the British government, in an effort to combat radio piracy in the 1920s, said that the right to enter homes was the key to maintaining the state's "control of the ether," critics responded that abolishing the radio would be better than forfeiting liberty.
In the course of describing these intellectual and economic battles, Jones includes memorable stories of a variety of Pirate Kings, such as Matthew Carey, the 19th-century American pirate and economic nationalist who campaigned for the free reprinting of European pamphlets. His campaign was so single-minded that his son denounced him for allowing his cause to destroy his family, leading Carey to accuse his son of "filial treason" and challenge him to a duel.
Johns ends with an insightful chapter describing how the old battles between property, piracy and privacy are being replayed today. The debate over Google's book-scanning project recalls Enlightenment-era attempts to create a universal library through mandatory book depository laws, debates over pharmaceutical patenting were anticipated in the Victorian era, and the file sharers of today resemble the home tapers of the 1960s.
Now that digital rights management technology has the capacity to invade the privacy of the home far more dramatically than the constables of old, and now that the U.S. government has alarmingly committed its enforcement powers to uphold corporate property rights in ways that are even more invasive to domestic privacy, Johns suggests rethinking the distinctions that have defined the intellectual property wars for centuries. He criticizes as obsolete the distinction between literary creativity, which is regulated by copyright, and mechanical creativity, which is regulated by patents. A modern taxonomy, Johns suggest, might focus on the distinction between digital and analogue copies or -- even more radically -- recognize multiple categories of material regulated by different legal regimes: "genetic, digital, algorithmic, inscribed, and more." Although "more complex in theory," this system might be simpler to use in practice, because it would more closely reflect the "contours of creative life." Since "the history of piracy is the history of modernity," Johns concludes in this challenging, richly detailed and provocative book, the choices we make about how to balance property, creativity and privacy will define "the contours of creative life" for the 21st century.
Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University, heads the project on Technology and the Constitution at the Brookings Institution.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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NEW IN PAPERBACK. A guide to new collections from some of fiction's top authors.
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Reviewed by Nora Krug
Being raised by back-to-the-land hippies turned Novella Carpenter into a cynic about the pastoral life. When friends tell her they want to move to the country to "split wood, milk goats, and become one with nature, I shake my head," she writes in "Farm City" (Penguin, $16). For her, bucolic idylls go hand-in-hand with loneliness. But Carpenter, who became a writing student of Michael Pollan's, still yearned for the fruits -- both literal and philosophical -- of an idealized agrarian life. So in 2005 she turned an abandoned lot behind her apartment in Oakland, Calif., into a small farm, complete with honeybees, chickens, ducks, rabbits, turkeys and pigs. "I felt a bit nuts, yes, but I also felt great," she explains.
Readers wary of yet another tome preaching the benefits of eating locally needn't worry: Carpenter's chronicle of urban farming -- a trend she has helped foster with this book and her blog, Ghost Town Farm -- is as much a cautionary tale as a celebration of self-sufficiency. "The garden," she writes, is a "verdant cornucopia on one hand, (and a) rodent-attracting breeding ground on the other." A brief experiment in which Carpenter eats only food from within 100 yards of her home turns her so grumpy, thin and desperate that she uses a corncob mantel display to make cornmeal.
Urban-agrarian tension emerges at almost every turn in this entertaining account, as Carpenter's chickens meander into neighbors' apartments (during the avian flu scare!) and her farm is threatened by various forms of the city's indigenous wildlife: opossums, guard dogs, hungry vagrants, real estate developers. Carpenter rolls with it all, though, pausing only for a moment to appreciate the rigor of her task: "I would never laugh at my parents' hapless experiment again."
When William Powers, an international aid worker, met a successful doctor and tax-resister voluntarily living in a 12-by-12-foot trailer in rural North Carolina, he was both intrigued and disturbed. "The edifice was so slight that, viewed from a certain angle, it seemed as if it might simply vanish," he writes in "Twelve by Twelve" (New World, $14.95). "To choose to live in anything that small was insane." Tucked amid a permaculture farm ripe with berries, fruit trees and other relatively easy-to-maintain food sources, the doctor's property offered neither electricity nor running water.
Powers, who had recently returned to the United States from Bolivia, was no stranger to ascetic living conditions. But he was burned out and in search of a new mantra. "My creed -- We can learn to live in harmony with each other and nature -- was stressed to the breaking point," he writes. When the doctor asked him to house-sit for 40 days, Powers -- who, at six feet tall, didn't have much head room -- grabbed the opportunity.
His account of this experience offers an enlightening and eloquent (if at times pious) look at the challenges of living off the grid. "Taking five-gallon solar showers, harvesting my own teas, throwing cedar chips into the composting toilet" reminds him that "everything comes from the Earth." Not a profound thought, he admits, "but to once again touch, breathe, and eat this reality feels like reconciliation with a loved one after a long feud."
From our previous reviews:
"In Lost in the Meritocracy" (Anchor, $14.95), Walter Kirn "throws spit wads at his Ivy League education"; his memoir "recounts the many ways that the American educational rat race betrayed him," despite his achievements, noted Rachel Saslow.
Eugenia Kim captures "the arc of a woman's experience" against the backdrop of early 20th-century Korean history in "The Calligrapher's Daughter" (Holt, $16). Sybil Steinberg called the novel, much of which is based on the author's mother's life, "a poignant family history."
"The Bolter" (Vintage, $15.95), by Frances Osborne, is a biography of Lady Idina Sackville, whose husband-leaving tendencies earned her the nickname "the bolter." The book offers a vivid depiction of "the adventuring English upper class" of the 1920s and '30s, according to Carolyn See.
A.J. Jacobs praised "In the Land of Invented Languages" (Spiegel & Grau, $16), Arika Okrent's survey of artificial tongues such as Esperanto and Klingon. Okrent, he wrote, "is that rare linguist with a gift for lively language."
In "Methland" (Bloomsbury, $15), Nick Reding traces the methamphetamine epidemic in small-town America, showing how the drug "has taken root in -- and taken hold of -- its soul," according to David Liss.
"It's Our Turn to Eat" (Harper, $15.99), by Michela Wrong, an account of whistle-blower John Githongo's attempts to fight corruption in Kenya, reads "like a John le Carre novel as it traces the cloak-and-dagger maneuverings of Kenya's political bosses," wrote Caroline Elkins.
Nora Krug is The Washington Post's monthly paperback columnist. She can be reached at krugn(at symbol)washpost.com.
Copyright 2010 Washington Post Writers Group
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