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

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Copyright was developed to protect the printed word. In the late twentieth century can it and does it realistically serve to protect authors of audio, video and electronic products that are the vehicles of information supply in our multi-media age? Systematic copyright theft forms part of a multi-billion dollar international industry, which is able to thrive partly because it is easy to overlook what is known to be theft when the original material...