Piracy is a matter of your point of view. By Gerd Folkers

There are many myths about pirates. For some they are nothing more than criminals. For others, they are a means to an end – to cause harm to political and, in particular, economic opponents via their attacks. And, in the majority of cases, they do this in an extremely simple way – by creating an atmosphere of fear. Thus, stories of terror exceeding the historical facts are disseminated and shipping routes avoided, as in the case of Somalia. The result of this has been a huge increase in effort and expenditures, which has not only made freight more expensive but also caused shortages and, therefore, given some people the chance to make a nice profit. Things were not much different, for example, in medieval Europe. Thus, to damage the Hanseatic League, an association of European cities and merchant families formed with the aim of dominating trade in the northern hemisphere, countries such as Denmark entered into agreements with pirates and buccaneers. The pirates’ task was to capture the Hanseatic ships, the famed “Koggen”. In return, they were allowed to sell the captured goods on the free market. But who bought them? Most likely the Hanseatic merchants. And why do today’s tax and data pirates seem so familiar? Because, as in the past, modern-day piracy is a question of viewpoint: it makes a difference whether you are the Minister of Economics in Germany or Switzerland as to how you view a CD with bank-account details – both physically and ethically.

While the Pirates of the Caribbean are currently a box-office hit for Hollywood and some people are actually envious of their “romantic buccaneering” ways, the music industry is a Happy Hunting Ground for numerous real-life pirates, some of whom have already landed behind bars, for example, the operators of the world’s biggest filesharing portal, “The Pirate Bay”. After finding them guilty of “complicity in the provision of illegal copies”, Stockholm District Court sentenced them to a year in prison and payment of € 2.74 million in damages to an alliance of media companies including Columbia Pictures, EMI, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Bros. However, the image of modern internet pirates is also a question of perspective. Thus, the first server used by these pirates, the operators of Pirate Bay, has been put into a museum. The Stockholm Museum of Technology purchased it for € 186 after it had been confiscated by the police.

Even the distinction between the original product or work and a copy of it, as well as the resulting condemnation of the copying process are dependent on context. Only in recent times have we come to speak of plagiarism. And it is only now that we have the sophisticated methods necessary to prove what is and what is not a copy. Today, “copying” represents the theft of intellectual property for one but a new kind of art for another. As, for example, in the case of Helene Hegemann, a young, highly talented woman who published a highly acclaimed novel. Subsequently, it turned out that she had simply copied large chunks from the internet. Some consider that to be plagiarism. Others regard it as a new art form in literature.

No matter what we think of pirates, piracy is changing our society and the meaning of ownership. Pirates were and continue to be driving forces of new social patterns – today as proponents of free access to data in a society dominated by patent protection; in the late middle ages as “Likedeelern”, North Sea pirates who, in distinction to the strict hierarchy prevailing in other parts of society, distributed the booty equably among the crew.

Gerd Folkers was appointed Professor for Pharmaceutical Chemistry at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in 1991. Prior to this, he took his doctorate at the University of Bonn, Germany and, after spending time abroad, habilitated in drug design at the Pharmaceutical Institute of the University of Tübingen, Germany, in 1990. Gerd Folkers is a member of the Swiss National Research Council and on the board of several start-up companies. He has founded a spin-off company for a virtual teaching platform in the field of bio-medicine and is author and publisher of numerous articles and books on drug research and development. Since 2004, he has been director of the Collegium Helveticum, a joint institute of the University of Zürich and the ETH.