COPYING PIRACY IS NOT ORIGINAL

"Nothing is perfectly static. Every word, grammatical element , every locution, every sound, and accent is a slowly changing configuration, moulded by the invisible, an impersonal drift,  that is the life of language"

--Edward Sapir 

" Of all the linguistic elements caught up in this drift , meaning is probably the least resistant to change"
 --Ullmann

Counterfeit once meant a legitimate copy and egregious was eminent, nice was stupid and foolish. Ejaculate was seminally a bit different than what it is now so  much so that Dickens could write in in Bleak House 'Sir Leicester leans back in his chair, and breathlessly ejaculates'. If 'exception proves the rule' appears illogical , it is because prove meant to test!. In 14th century Middle English, abandon meant “to subjugate or subdue” , an addict ( from Latin addictus) was an indigent person given as slave to a debtor and assassin was a hashish - eater. Awful in 1300s  was 'inspiring wonder' while in the 1400s,  a nervous person was actually “sinewy and vigorous” – as the Latin word nervus applied to both sinews and nerves.  

While I didn't have much of an opinion on these drifts, I was especially disappointed at the semantic change of the word pirate and piracy. I was not aware that piracy, though derived from an Indo European root which meant try or experiment, had to do with anything other than sea- thieves or robbers -  but robbers with a charm, élan and panache. Pirates held a special fascination for me in my childhood ever since I read in Class IV that they had held captive even the great Julius Caesar.  In the Warrant of Precedence  I had drawn up as a young boy, I placed them on top of the pecking order - ahead of  the land thieves and robbers. Sea life had held a special romance. It started with Jason and Argonauts, moved on with Robinson Crusoe before being totally besotted with  the lore and legend  woven around   Long John Silver, his crutch and parrot Captain Flint, treasure hunt, smell of salt and sweat, jollity and drunkenness:

"Fifteen men on the dead man's chest..

…Yo-ho-yo, and a bottle of rum!

Drink and the devil had done for the rest---

Yo-ho-ho, and a bottle of rum!"

My favourite comic character Phantom had vowed to fight piracy, and the merry band of Gaul warriors Asterix and Obelix had repeatedly thwacked the sea pirates team of Red Beard, Peg-leg, the perched atop the crow's nest  African Pirate Lookout . Nevertheless, I always dreamt  about possessing  my own boat with its mast and sails, the Jolly Roger aflutter with its  crossbones and skull, a black eyepatch around one  eye, an extravagant   tricorne over my head and a luxurious  moustache drooping down. My friends and brothers clapped, and sometimes suffered, as I lead the charge with a swagger on my  peg -leg, brandishing the cutlass with my right even as  the dagger and dirk  lay next to the iron hook that served as my left hand . You could say a combination  of Long John Silver, Captain Hook, Red Rackham, Blackbeard and Calico Jack. 

Captain Jack Sparrow was many, many years after me- and Johnny Depp's was no match on my eye patch ! Okay, if it is overboard, doesn't matter. Cheer, cherish and celebrate a child's dream. Whenever we played Chor - Sipahi, I would always grab the role of the cop but when it came to sea fights, it was always the pirate chief for me. 

But the reverie of childhood was rudely broken much later when I landed with a job in Bengal. No, I had nothing against Bengal. Conceded that its vehicular  traffic, when not  yielding  to the gay abandon of jay walkers  would be blocked by makeshift bully pulpits on nooks and corners and crossings. There was no denying that it required Brazil , a nation thousands of miles away,  to unite its people emotionally. Its black and white era aantel paaturis  bathed with a regularity and energy that made Bedouins look like mermaids.  But then its capital  Calcutta is a lovely city, the people have a history and future of  unequal measures.  Even  though individually  revolutionary,  the Bengalis vote with emphatic unanimity - in cycles of thirty four years . They  have by far the richest Indian literary tradition and in my book the most delicious and variegated cuisine.  Being an artisanal society,  the people  are amazingly aesthetic while  their air is refreshingly unpolluted by caste fumes that are belched from the hate chimneys of  Cow Belt.

Where Bengal disappointed me was in  the quality of its  pirates or the jal dasyus. How could a state which had the most ingenious of the money launderers ( the art being reverentially called the Kalkatta channel), the most intrepid of international cattle smugglers and human traffickers, gun runners, and extortionists  come to have such languid and lackadaisical jal dasyus?  After their capture and arrest near Kakdweep, I had a chance to meet and interrogate a few jal dasyus . I was devastated to learn that there were no boat- to- boat fights, no crow nests either, neither a scimitar nor an  eye patch, and nary a man disabled in any charming way. They all  smelt so ordinarily of brine and wet wood. Famished, scrawny, sad eyes sunk in their hollowed sockets,  veins throbbing out like those of professional blood donors,  ribs sticking out like cattle  in a drought, dirty lungi , soiled genji,  a gamchha, an assortment of unreliable country made guns - they were such a huge let down. I was shattered. I totally revised my opinion about pirates and piracy. 

And if this is was not enough about what the romantic vocation of piracy had come to, I was in for a bigger disappointment. When I joined the CID, I was asked to supervise the investigation of some cases of what amounted to piracy which was so morbidly  non nautical. Yes, these were cases of piracy  - about copyright violations of books and music. Somehow, I had no idea that these activities, so low on physical risks, with not a single icon to match the pantheon of the sea pirates, had been, for over five centuries,  termed piracies. Okay, the age of printing and the golden age of buccaneering coincided. But terming the violators of printing as pirates was such an overreaction and misrepresentation. Where was the derring- do in the printer keeping a supernumerary copy and selling by the side or a journeyman taking some extra copies like the scraps allowed to butchers' apprentices?

It appears that one Atykins, to further his own financial interests of securing the right to publish books on Common Law in late 17th century England, played  upon Charles II's fear and unease about the new book trade and the capacity of the new printed argument to spread knowledge beyond the traditionally controlled folds of university, court and church. He  picked upon the Stationer's Company which was a kind of a publishing guild through which all printing had be legalised. He termed  its stranglehold similar to that of the pirates ( already made infamous due to the string of buccaneering activities in Caribbean and de-romanticized and stained in a particularly harsh , though influential, narrative in Captain Charles Johnson's General History of the Pyrates). He demonised piracy as antithetical to civilisation quoting Cicero and Thyucdides and  also an apocryphal story of Alexander and a sea pirate. 

All forms of 'impropriety' that could come in way of capital accumulation would be termed piratical. And soon piracy became the new flavour of the season-  a synonym for all wide range of sins involving misappropriation of ideas- plagiarising, epitomising, translating, abridging, etc. People of different trade, the engineers, inventors, cartographers, naturalists, apothecaries, engravers, physicians,  dubbed their rivals as pirates. Interestingly, some famous people used the route of book piracy to put into circulation some works which through the legal channel could have invited state censorship- Isaac Newton used this channel to get a few of his  unorthodox texts published thus.

And now in the age of digital technology and internet, all forms of transgressions of copyright infringements and IP theft are interchangeably dubbed acts of piracy. Even if one stains and besmirches sea -piracy, it appears quite astounding that  the act of a twelve year old  swapping music with his friends is piracy. Industry has cried hoarse and keeps on devising strategies, both legal and technological, against the 'evils' of piracy which has affected its tills and balance sheets. 

However, the wail against piracy that it is theft from artists has been countered with argument that artists rarely hold ownership which are routinely assigned to a corporate distributor. The ideological underpinnings of the war against piracy in the digital age have been questioned.The conceptualisation of copyrighted works as property which is subject to 'ownership' and  is critical to the 'piracy' trope,  is fundamentally fallacious. Some have even wondered how much of "intellectual content" is actually original. High costs of software with no differential pricing has been criticised as corporate brigandry. Extent of loss of revenues and jobs have often been found to be inaccurate and fallacious. 

Well, this debate can go on, and this blog is not intended to settle it even though it may have flagged it. I only wanted to lodge my protest at the unseemly bending of the term pirate and its inappropriateness . Interestingly, the way to the future  for the various segments affected by Copyright  infringement and IP theft can be seen how the porn industry has dealt with its pirates. Pornography is the most commonly traded type of file on the net, but despite illegal file sharing, porn companies have not sued any file sharing company, and  have grown even as record labels and movie studios experience slump. This is no place to list out the corporate strategies of the porn industry, which I leave to you to surf and be updated and rewarded, but rest assured, piracy cannot effect a quietus interruptus.