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Theft Or Innovation? BOOKS & ARTS Vol 463|25 February 2010 BOOKS & ARTS Theft or innovation? A history of intellectual-property rights reveals how the pirating of ideas and goods has transformed science publishing, drug development and software, explains Michael Gollin. Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns University of Chicago Press: 2010. 640 pp. $35, £24 BLICKWINKEL/ALAMY By allowing scientists, inventors and artists to assert property rights over their creative work, the intellectual-property system rewards the investment of time and money required to bring ideas to market. Piracy, or unauthorized copying, of creative works is usually seen as a simple violation of commercial rights, with pirates as thieves. Historian Adrian Johns argues instead that piracy is a cultural force that has driven the development of intellectual-property law, politics and practices. As copying technologies have advanced, from the invention of printing in the sixteenth century to the present, acts of piracy have shaped endeavours from scientific The cinchona plant was targeted for illicit export as it contains the antimalarial compound quinine. publishing to pharmaceuticals and software. Pirates duplicate an innovative idea, pub- advantage — by moving quickly, using technical briefly during the French Revolution. Less lication or thing, ignoring the objections of countermeasures or banding together and pro- radical ideas have been adopted into law, contemporaries who assert a dominant right. moting reputation as an indicator of quality, including the copyright defence of fair use and Arguments against piracy have changed little such as through trademarks. In the nineteenth the compulsory licensing of patent rights on over the centuries: pirated books, machines, century, US policy encouraged the free use of important inventions such as drugs. Govern- medicines and software are criticized as being foreign technology to promote immigration ments have backed copyright-royalty tribunals dangerous or inferior to authentic ones; pirates and invention by talented craftspeople, scien- to ensure distribution of music revenues to the destroy the social fabric of creativity by deny- tists and engineers. copyright holders, and have instituted alterna- ing innovators their due compensation; pirates Today’s debates about publishing genetic tives to privately funded innovation, such as stand outside moral and legal norms. Industry sequences in databases and the drive for open- state funding of research. giants attack companies who make cheap cop- access scientific journals have a history that is Piracy has led commerce to adopt counter- ies of drugs and software as pirates, and conser- as old as printing. London’s physicians joined measures. Private, self-policing business vation organizations berate those who collect together to publish the first national pharma- associations were established as early as the indigenous genetic material, particularly from copoeia in 1618 as a way to avoid pirated drug seventeenth century, when booksellers formed the tropics, as biopirates. formulations. Ironically, that book made it their own registry of publications. In revolu- But piracy has always had its supporters. easier for others to copy the formulations in tionary America, printers such as Benjamin Printers in revolutionary America saw their it, and the book itself was pirated. The evolu- Franklin banded together, and today, inter- copying of British works as resisting an oppres- tion of peer-reviewed journals helped to dis- national trade associations fight piracy for the sive government, and some pirates today see tinguish authentic authors and inventors from recording, movie, pharmaceutical and agricul- themselves as patriots fighting foreign domi- the outsiders who copied their scientific works tural industries. nation. Pirates champion the rights of private and instruments. But publication also aided Private associations can derive from pirati- individuals against governments or monopolis- copying, and the possibility of piracy became cal groups. Johns traces historical overlaps tic corporations — by making available unau- a rationale for introducing copyright and the between pirate radio operators in the 1920s, thorized copies of movies, for example. Pirates patenting of scientific work to protect its com- ham radio operators of the 1960s, the ‘phone claim to promote the flow of information in mercial potential. phreakers’ of the 1970s — who exchanged a free society, and to serve the poorer sectors The exclusive rights granted by intellectual- techniques for making free, long-distance of society with lower-priced drugs, hardware property laws are always being reshaped by pub- phone calls — and the Homebrew computer and software. lic opinion, and accused pirates have lobbied club in the San Francisco Bay area of Califor- Johns suggests, counter-intuitively, that against these laws for centuries. The strongest nia, in which the sharing of ideas helped to piracy can promote the development of form of their argument — that all property incubate the personal computer. The open- technology. The resulting competition forces rights should be eliminated in publications, source and open-access communities pro- legitimate innovators to manoeuvre for ideas and objects — has not prevailed, except mote information sharing using sophisticated 1022 © 2010 Macmillan Publishers Limited. All rights reserved NATURE|Vol 463|25 February 2010 OPINION practices that avoid the label of piracy and its dynamics that scientists, lawyers, policy- of the central dogma — that information flows legal consequences, which has helped them to makers, business people and consumers in one direction, from DNA to RNA to pro- become accepted in parts of the commercial should understand. When pirates gain the teins — also dates from this period, along with and technological establishment. upper hand, innovators suffer and quality the gradual realization that the structures and Today’s intellectual-property system is built declines. But when exclusivity becomes too functions of molecules in cells are more com- on decisions made in the past. In revealing how strong, society loses the benefits of access. plicated than he had earlier assumed. piracy affected those decisions, Johns’s history A constant effort is required to balance the Olby brilliantly follows Crick through these provides a valuable addition to the literature. interests of innovators and copiers, and to creative years. By highlighting the scientist’s However, the book does not deal with the nurture a healthy creative environment. ■ interactions with a growing group of others future implications of piracy. Lacking a prac- Michael Gollin is a law partner at Venable LLP in devoted to developing the field, he captures the tical understanding of current intellectual- Washington DC and author of Driving Innovation. excitement, false dawns and triumphs that fol- property law and practice, Johns is unable to He chairs the group Public Interest Intellectual lowed the Watson–Crick model of DNA. Olby is draw lessons or make predictions or recom- Property Advisors, whose forthcoming book is fair to all of the early participants in DNA work: mendations. Intellectual Property and Human Development. Linus Pauling, Maurice Wilkins and, above Piracy is an aspect of intellectual-property e-mail: [email protected] all, Rosalind Franklin and her collaborators at King’s College London. Watson and Crick used Franklin’s data, and benefited from a breakdown in relations between Franklin and Wilkins that interrupted Wilkins’s work on the molecule. The Symmetry and hubris full story emerged only after the Nobel prize was awarded in 1962 to Watson, Francis Crick: Hunter of Life’s Secrets which he worked on mine Crick and Wilkins; by then, by Robert Olby research for the Admi- Franklin had died, tragically Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press: 2009. ralty. After the war, Crick young, of ovarian cancer. In 450 pp. $45, £30 convinced the Medical 1952, both Franklin and Research Council (MRC) Pauling were close to com- to give him a studentship ing up with the structure Francis Crick was not your run-of-the-mill to apply physics to biology. themselves. scientist, as Robert Olby makes clear in his He went to Cambridge, Issues of priority generate superb biography. A tall man given to verbal first to the Strangeways passion, but Olby’s account & CALLAWAY M. LIEBERMAN/SIEGEL diarrhoea and infectious laughter, Crick did Research Laboratory, and can be recommended for its his Nobel-prizewinning work before he fin- then to what is now known dispassionate analysis and ished his PhD. His thesis, on the X-ray analysis as the MRC Laboratory of Francis Crick: no ordinary scientist. mastery of archival sources. of protein structure, provided him with skills Molecular Biology (LMB). Crick’s long-time collabo- to appreciate the molecular arrangement of Discovering the structure of DNA saved his ration with Sydney Brenner, another scientific DNA, but his work with James Watson was career. Lawrence Bragg, director of the Cav- giant, is given its due. So, too, are Crick’s later done in his spare time. Crick included an off- endish Laboratories where the LMB was then decades spent at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, print of their 25 April 1953 Nature paper, the housed, had grown tired of Crick’s boisterous California, where he became a neuroscientist. most fundamental in twentieth-century life behaviour. After the DNA paper, Bragg held Crick led a privileged existence there,
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