Abstract

What is a pirate? In this excerpt from a forthcoming book, Florent Latrive uses a series of historical examples to show that the pirate copy, as a legal and artificial construction, is a notion that varies in time and space. Who still remembers that as recently as 1976, the Hollywood majors dragged a diabolical technological invention, the tape deck, into the courts, and proved that if everyone could freely pirate the films broadcast over television, the entire film industry would soon bite the dust ?