Re: The Seven Types Of Pirate

From: "Christopher R. Maden" 
On 10/18/2010 08:17 PM, joseph harris wrote:
> From: "Lee Passey"
>> Those people who equate copyright infringement with rape and
>> pillage (piracy? come on...)
> 
> As I recall, it was the 'pirates' who called themselves that, not
> there opponents. And isn't the Swedish site called Pirate Bay, or
> similar.

Er, no... but in equal criticism to Lee’s point, it isn’t a new thing
either.  Wikipedia[0] says:

> Prior to the Statute of Anne 1709, the Stationers' Company of London in
> 1557 received a Royal Charter giving the company a monopoly  on
> publication and tasking it with enforcing the charter. Those who
> violated the charter were labelled pirates as early as 1603.[1]

Neither new nor self-applied.

Time flies when you’re having rum,
Chris the Ninja Pirate (yarr!)

[0] <URL:
https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Copyright_infringement >

[1] T. Dekker.  The Wonderfull Yeare 1603.  <URL:
http://www.luminarium.org/renascence-editions/yeare.html >
-- 
Chris Maden, text nerd  <URL: http://crism.maden.org/ >
“I like being free, and that makes me an idiot, I suppose.”
  — Stan Rogers, “The Idiot”
GnuPG Fingerprint: C6E4 E2A9 C9F8 71AC 9724 CAA3 19F8 6677 0077 C319


Nicely researched, Chris, and an interesting point. Two things.

Here 'company' is not as we understand it today; it was in fact the London printers' 'trade union' which exercised an iron grip monopoly on all printing, and therefore publishing. It was the Queen Anne Act that broke that monopoly and gave the right of copy, in the multitude of small individual controls, to the creator.

Secondly, the inclusion of the word pirate in this context means, almost certainly that the word was in use in that context before, so it would not prove who first used it. And remember that sea pirates - often English pirates and buccanneers - were a feature of life. And here piracy is the taking of goods that do not belong to the taker; so it might well have been a logical transfer. The main OED might identify the first use for print. But this can be decades after the first colloquial use.

Joseph




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