Alexx's Journal

Recently read: _The Republic of Pirates: Being the True and Surprising Story of the Caribbean Pirates and the Man Who Brought Them Down_, by Colin Woodard (2007). It's well-researched, and the material is fascinating. Pity it wasn't better prose work, but its virtues did keep me reading until the end. Mild recommendation.

I was fascinated by political aspects to piracy that I hadn't previously been aware of. At least 2 major pirate fleets were organized around the idea of supporting the Jacobite Rebellion in England. (Hence the ship name "Queen Anne's Revenge".) That rebellion never got off the ground enough to actually interact with those 'navies' directly, but it's how they got some of their local support.

More generally, the socioeconomic aspect was really brought out in this book. Part of why piracy was so popular among english speakers was that British sailors got a *really* raw deal from the government, and not much better from private industry. Piracy was in many ways a direct reaction to the inequalities of mercantile capitalism run amok. Ordinary people often supported pirates for much the same reasons that the Robin Hood myth endures.

Happened to be at the Boston Museum of Science over the weekend, and took in a temporary exhibit, "Shipwrecked!", about recent recoveries from centuries-old shipwrecks, and the technology used to bring them back. It had a half-hearted piracy aspect, clearly aimed at bringing people in, but this was a very minor aspect. It's a nifty exhibit of what it is, just don't buy the pirate advertising.

A recent Metro Tech section had a brief blurb about Malaysian Video Pirates contracting a hit on some dogs who had been trained by the MPAA to sniff out counterfeit DVDs. This seemed implausible on the face of it, but I was curious enough to google it. Luckily, one of the first hits was the informative Techdirt, who had a lot to say about this incident, all of it snarky. (You can click on the links in their article to see their prior coverage about the dogs.)

These bootleg-sniffing dogs turn out to be real -- up to a point. Firstly, there are exactly two of them (Lucky and Flo) to battle all of worldwide DVD piracy. Secondly, counterfeit DVDs smell... exactly like legitimate DVDs, so you figure they have to generate a lot of false positives. Methinks this is the MPAA's equivalent of Security Theater.