Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates – Adrian Johns

Written with a historian’s flair for narrative and sparkling detail, this rollicking true yarn is packed to the yardarm with fabulous protagonists. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by author Adrian Johns will have many people pondering print, property and pirates, other than a wonderfully wicked Johnny Depp in the Carribbean.

Since the rise of Napster and other file sharing services in its wake, most of us have assumed that intellectual piracy is a product of the digital age and that it threatens creative expression as never before. The Motion Picture Association of America, for instance, claimed that in 2005 the film industry lost $2.3 billion in revenue to piracy online. But here Adrian Johns shows that piracy has a much longer and more vital history than we have realized – one that has been largely forgotten and is little understood.

$37.97 RRP: $77.99 Save 51% $53.49 RRP: $53.49 Save 0% $53.96 RRP: $59.95 Save 10% Spend $50 for FREE delivery Spend $65 for FREE delivery $6.95 flat fee delivery The prices listed above were correct at the time they were added to BookOffers however prices change so make sure you click through to each of the featured merchants to check the current price

Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates explores the intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first.  The book swarms throughout with characters of genius, principle, cunning, and outright criminal intent. In the wars over piracy, it is the victims – from Charles Dickens to Bob Dylan – who have always been the best known, but the principal players – the pirates themselves – have long languished in obscurity, and it is their stories especially that Johns brings to life in these vivid pages.

Brimming with broader implications for today’s debates over open access, fair use, free culture, and the like, Johns’ 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. From Cervantes to Sonny Bono, from Maria Callas to Microsoft, from Grub Street to Google, no chapter in the story of piracy evades Johns’ graceful analysis in what will be the definitive history of the subject for years to come.

Read this book? – Leave a comment or review below.

Related posts:

1. The Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars – Richard Overy
2. Little-Known Wars of Great and Lasting Impact – Alan Axelrod
3. Accidental Guerrilla: Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One – David Kilcullen