Yo, Ho, Ho, and a Digital Scrum
The history of publishing is swimming with pirates—far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing—and the future of the book.
Johns, a historian at the University of Chicago, has done much of his hunting from his office here, which is packed so high with books that the professor bought a rolling ladder to keep them in easy reach. He can rattle off a long list of noted pirates through the years:
Alexander Pope accused “pyrates” of publishing unauthorized copies of his work in the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, a man known as the “king of the pirates” used the then-new technology of photolithography to spread cheap reprints of popular sheet music. In the 1950s, a pirate music label named Jolly Roger issued recordings by Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats from LP’s that the major labels were no longer publishing. A similar label put out opera recordings smuggled from the Soviet bloc.
» via The Chronicle of Higher Education (Subscription may be required for some content)


![Piracy: The Intellectual Property War from Gutenberg to Gates (Free eBook)
Available from the University of Chicago Press:
“[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. Johns’s history is liveliest when it is rooted in the personal—the 19th-century renegade bibliographer Samuel Egerton Brydges, for example, or the jazz and opera lovers who created a thriving network of bootleg recordings in the 1950s—but 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
» via TeleRead](http://29.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_kx64hhoa1l1qzsn48o1_500.jpg)
