Janke, Yankee, and How Early America Was a Nation of Pirates

Matt Mason, author of “The Pirates Dilemma,” asserts “America only industrialized as rapidly as it did by counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents and stealing intellectual property wholesale.”

I watched an interesting lecture yesterday afternoon online given by Matt Mason, author of “The Pirates Dilemma.” It’s worth noting because one of his assertions in it concerns the etymology of the word “Yankee,” which describes the very heart and soul of the United States. From the storied “Yankee Doodle Dandy,” a patriotic song that has long been synonymous with the US, to the famed New York baseball team, it’s a word with much history and usage yet surprisingly misunderstood.

Why? Because as Mason notes, the “…most likely source is the Dutch name Janke, which means “little Jan” or “little John,” a nickname that can be traced back to the 1680s, when it was used as a slang term for pirates.”

Yes pirates. For he argues that the reason why the United States was able to industrialize as quickly as it did during the 18th and 19th centuries is because we basically ignored European copyright laws and patents.

He furthers:

English sailors were the first to apply the term to Dutch pirates in the Caribbean. Yankee Dutch (1683) was a noted Dutch pirate of the Spanish Main, as was Captain Yankey (1684), and Captain John Williams (nickname: Yankee) (1687). General James Wolfe, the British general who secured North America by defeating the French at Quebec in the 1750s, was the first to use it as a derogatory term for the New Englanders in his army.

Back when New York was known as New Amsterdam, the English began using the word as a derogatory term for all the Dutch settlers there. These same Dutch settlers later began using Yankee to refer to English settlers of Connecticut, because they saw their unfair trading practices as ‘piratical’ and unethical. The term was later used to refer to all New Englanders, and the first recorded use of the term by the British to refer to Americans in general appears in the 1780s, in a letter by Lord Horatio Nelson.

But the term really gained steam during the Industrial Revolution. Europeans began using the term to refer to all North Americans as a result of America’s national policies towards European intellectual property. America only industrialized as rapidly as it did by counterfeiting European inventions, ignoring global patents and stealing intellectual property wholesale. “Lax enforcement of the intellectual property laws was the primary engine of the American economic miracle” writes Doron S. Ben-Atar in Trade Secrets. “The United States employed pirated know-how to industrialize.” Europeans saw America as a nation of bootleggers, which was a little unfair, as every major European country was also heavily engaged in piracy and industrial espionage at some point in the 18th century. Piracy was, in fairness, the only way the U.S. could keep up.

The reason why all of this is worth discussing is because it’s an important piece of history that must be taken into account when discussing current copyright and patent laws as other countries are also seeking to industrialize.

The United States goes to great lengths to ensure that American corporations are fairly compensated for all their efforts, but it oftentimes fails to realize that most are not as well off as we are. Most can’t afford $179 USD for Windows Vista (Home Basic), $15 USD for a new DVD release, or even $20 USD for the latest Madonna album.

For in his book Mason also reiterates the findings of John Tehranian, a law professor at the University of Utah, who has calculated that each of us would be liable for $12.45 million USD if we were sued every time we accidentally violated copyright law in a single day.

“Copyright law is playing a profound role in shaping our very identities,” Tehranian writes. “Copyright’s regulation, propertization, and monopolization of cultural content determine who can draw upon such content in the discursive process of identity formation.”

“In short, copyright laws lie at the heart of ‘struggles over discursive power—the right to create, and control, cultural meanings.’

Morever, absent from the debate over copyright laws and protections in the discussion is how America has grown so transfixed by the economic concerns of multi-national corporations and conglomerates, that it’s lost sight of the fact that we too went to great lengths to advance, to industrialize, and to enjoy the creature comforts of our European counterparts.

Absent too is public input over how long it should be before creative works enter the public domain. In 1998, Congress passed the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA), which lengthened the copyright term of all creative works by an additional twenty years. By altering the terms of the state-granted copyright monopoly for millions of creative works, the Act represented a multi-billion dollar allocation decision made by Congress and ensured that virtually no creative works would enter the public domain over the following two decades.

So with actions like these does it really come as a surprise that people are ignoring our copyright laws?

Perhaps our own history as a nation of Yankees is worth revisiting.