Nate Anderson at Ars has a great write-up of The Pirate’s Dillemma, which points out that American history is replete with piracy:
Now, some acts of piracy are “quite simply theft,” but others are more complicated than that. American cinema and cable television were founded as outlaw institutions (there’s a reason that Hollywood flourished as far away from DC and New York as it was possible to get). Piracy, in Mason’s view, is actually an American institution that the Founders would have been proud of. “During the nineteenth century Industrial Revolution, the Founding Fathers pursued a policy of counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents, and stealing intellectual property wholesale.”
The situation lasted for so long that Dickens was still complaining about it when he toured the US and found pirated editions of his books everywhere. Americans were so known for piracy that they were eventually branded Yankees, from the Dutch “Janke,” slang for a pirate.
However, Nate argues that there are some problems with the argument. In particular, it lumps together actual piracy with peer production efforts like blogs and free software. Certainly the latter are worth celebrating, but that doesn’t necessarily tell us anything in particular about the merits of the former. You can get the book here.
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