By Manushag N. Powell, Purdue University
Piracy is sometimes used very loosely and often just refers to some sort of theft, especially if the theft is positioned as galling or shocking, or even just not easily fit in other categories. One especially interesting use of terms like piracy and pirate is as the way of referring to and villainizing copyright violators.
Copyright Violators or Pirates?
Calling copyright violators pirates is a modern habit with old roots, and we can trace such usage back to the 17th century. Although technically the use of ‘pirate’ to describe an unauthorized printer existed before copyright did.
As printing technology became faster and enabled wider dissemination of written materials, sometimes containing ideas and opinions, the government started to think maybe some regulation about printing things would be a good idea.
The Emergence of Print Piracy
The way this happened in England is that in 1557 the Stationer’s Company of London was given a monopoly on printing. They were also in charge of policing their monopoly. But rogue printers set up anyway, sometimes for ideological reasons, more often for profit-minded ones, and sometimes for both.
Just as people will pay for the goods that real pirates bring to the black market, they will also pay for cheaper pirated texts and other forms of media. These illicit printers were termed ‘pirates’ by the guild to emphasize that they were stealing real property and were violating the law of humans and kings when they did so.
But in 1695 a law called the Licensing Act, which had required all materials to be registered with the stationers, was intentionally allowed to lapse. Suddenly, anyone with capital and access could set up a printing press and print piracy exploded.
Daniel Defoe: A Victim of Print Piracy
The writer Daniel Defoe, who wrote extensively on pirates, found himself the victim of unscrupulous printers when he attempted to publish Jure Divino, a treatise on government by subscription (which would have allowed him to keep the profits instead of ceding them to the publisher).
The unscrupulous printer Benjamin Bragg released a pirated, error-filled edition of the work one day before Defoe’s authorized one came out.
A half-price half-length chapbook version also circulated. Defoe was furious and he added a preface to his text denouncing “the Gentleman Booksellers that threatened to pyrate it, as they call it, viz reprinted and sell it for half a crown”. This was in 1706.
Copyright Law and Its Inefficacy
The stationers, with an assist from philosophers like John Locke and angry Lockeans like Defoe, came up with a new argument to try to deal with their problem. A text was property, and property that, due to the labor involved in its creation, could only belong to an author unless the author signed it away.
The first copyright law was passed in 1710. It didn’t solve piracy, but it did create a whole litany of fun new reasons for people to sue each other. Just as in Allen v. Cooper, the lawsuits over copyright clearly adapt the language of maritime legal wrangling.
This article comes directly from content in the video series The Real History of Pirates. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
Tactics of Authors and Publishers
In a well-known case filed in 1741 and pitting the poet Alexander Pope against the unscrupulous bookseller Edmund Curll, one side claimed an unauthorized text was piracy and the other that it was a “lawful prize”—suggesting that the pirate was really an authorized privateer.
Pope, watching an excuse to publish his letters and to harass Curll at the same time, had arranged for a copy of his letters to be leaked to the bookseller and then sued him for publishing them while bringing out his own deluxe and corrected edition.
A common tactic of publishers like Curll was to arrange for a cheap run of a text in another nation and then claimed that they were reprinting that text. As with maritime piracy in its early years, Ireland was a continual problem along these lines. Dublin pirates, locked out of the London market, were prolific and successful and sold their cheaper editions throughout Britain.
Literary Piracy: Patriotic Democracy?
International copyright also has a particular history in the US, in fact, which was notably horrible about ignoring foreign copyright claims. Meredith McGill has argued that the roots of American literary culture are not in original works by themselves, but in such works in tandem with rampant literary piracy.
Massive scale reprinting of European, especially English works, was justified by American booksellers as a kind of patriotic act, the democratization of print culture.
This view was not, shall we say, universally accepted by authors of other nations. From European authors like Charles Dickens to dramatists Gilbert and Sullivan were driven to distraction by the way their popularity in America could not translate to royalties.
Case of Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan are particularly on-point cases. They were infuriated by the pirated American versions of their nautical hit, HMS Pinafore, which at one point was playing unauthorized in eight different New York theaters, a record putting Walter Scott’s The Pirate to shame.
In response, they wrote The Pirates of Penzance, still one of their best-loved musicals, and opened it on Broadway in 1879 before it premiered in London to try to get control of its international copyright status. They did secure some of the profits for their touring company, but the work was perhaps inevitable, given the subject was still widely pirated.
The most useful takeaway for our purposes, though, is the simple fact that the 17th century legal battles over actual nautical piracy and over intellectual property rights came up together and that the two concepts have been more or less linked for hundreds of years.
The historian of intellectual piracy, Adrian Johns, argues strongly that all of the major intellectual property debates of today have analogies from the past.
Common Questions about Understanding Literary Piracy and Tracing Its Roots
The illicit printers were termed ‘pirates‘ by the guild to emphasize that they were stealing real property and were violating the law of humans and kins when they did so.
The first copyright law was passed in 1710. However, it didn’t solve piracy, but it did create a whole litany of fun new reasons for people to sue each other.
When Daniel Defoe attempted to publish Jure Divino, a treatise on government by subscription, the unscrupulous printer Benjamin Bragg released a pirated, error-filled edition of the work one day before Defoe’s authorized one came out.
