Pillaged Books and Plundered Maps: Pirates and the Boundaries of Language

When the king asked him what he was thinking of, that he should molest the sea, he said with defiant independence: ‘The same as you when you molest the world! Since I do this with a little ship I am called a pirate. You do it with a great fleet and are called an emperor.’ (St. Augustine’s City of God (1963), cf. Baer (1982, 19–20)). Societies sometime proceed through the punishment of small thefts, and the institutionalization of larger ones. The same might be said of research. Pirates can be writers, and writers can be pirates. Academics teach students not to plagiarize, or steal others’ words, but citations themselves, and scholarly writing more broadly, can be viewed as a type of regulated robbery. Citations acknowledge another’s contribution, while giving the author permission to take and reuse it. Authors are also the subjects of piracy, since the term piracy also refers to the downloading of copyrighted documents, books, videos and music, either through peer-to-peer torrent software or directly from websites like Aaaaarg.fail, whose name references stereotyped piratical dialects. Not coincidentally, in Europe earlier definitions of intellectual piracy were connected to mercantilist laws that excommunicated pirates from the national community (Temple 2000).