ABSTRACT

Analogies are helpful tools for expressing and explaining ideas or the significance of events – but they are often inadequate for analysis itself. Piracy is a perfect example of this problem, particularly because different disciplines often accentuate certain meanings of the term so that piracy – and the pirate – will fit into their already developed disciplinary framework. In a 2003 law review article, James Boyle calls the late twentieth-century expansion of the scope and scale of copyright and other intellectual property protections 'The second enclosure movement'. The law article said, that the new state-created property rights may be 'intellectual' rather than 'real'. but once again things that were formerly thought of as either common property or uncommodifiable are being covered with new, or newly extended, property rights. Indigenous people, likewise, often find the intellectual property rights captured through practices like biopiracy to be inconsequential except insofar as their traditional rights to the land are otherwise threatened.