“People who casually use the term ‘piracy’ to refer to the unauthorized exchange of copyrighted music, movies, books, and software would gain a deeper understanding of the terms they use by picking up the highly readable book Villains of All Nations: Atlantic Pirates in the Golden Age by Marcus Rediker. This recently released study (Beacon Press, ISBN 0-8070-5024-5) describes the lives and political significance of pirates at the period of their greatest growth during the early eighteenth century.

Pirates, in Rediker’s analysis, were more than just thieves. They created an alternative way to regard work, society, and life’s pleasures in an economically and religiously repressive age.

By the eighteenth century, pirates–their ranks fortified by political dissidents and utopian communalists–had created an on-board ethos of democracy, sharing, and mutual insurance. (They created the earliest social security system.) This is in contrast to the military and trading ships of the day, ruled by absolutist captains who cheated their staff, kept food and water rations criminally low, and freely employed the whip.

The pirates treated people of all races equally, in contrast to the racist practices of their opponents that reached its extreme in slave trading. The pirates admitted women to their ranks and apparently were sexually loose.

The pirates spoke consciously and articulately about the oppression of sailors and others by the sinfully rich capitalists and traders of their time, and refused to be placated by the religious platitudes of such status-quo philosophers as Cotton Mather. (In fact, Cotton Mather admitted to some extent that the pirates were right.)

Rediker does not prettify pirates. He says forthright they were not just bandits and murderers but also terrorists–in the sense that they used violence to create fear and bend others to their will. Still, they possessed a sense of justice and chivalry that is usually missing from modern military engagements.

Pirates were dissolute, destructive, and often drunk. But this represented an excess of their basic vision of freedom: freedom from masters, freedom from the fear of sin, freedom from hunger.

Is it difficult to find a common thread between the villification of eighteenth-century pirates and the villification of people who trade or illegally sell music, moves, books, and software today? Like the old pirates, the information traders create a bounty from the work of others (the artists and writers). But at the same time, they create a new vision of information democracy that contrasts positively with the control freaks and commercial cynicism of the mainstream media conglomerates.” (oreillynet )