Debates over fair use, free culture, illegal downloading, and copyright protection have been simmering since the dawn of the digital era. Intellectual property is a hot-button topic, as the Atlantic’s technology blogger Nicholas Jackson points out, and every once and a while a story breaks that positions a major cultural figure at the center of the IP wars. Today’s news stars New Wave filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard, who recently donated 1,000 euros toward the legal defense of James Climent, a French citizen accused of downloading 13,788 MP3s. Godard’s pithy rationale? “There’s no such thing as intellectual property.”

Whether or not you share Godard’s position, Adrian John’s Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, is a vital history worth consulting. Piracy explores intellectual property wars from the advent of print culture in the fifteenth century to the reign of the Internet in the twenty-first, ultimately arguing that piracy has always stood at the gateway between creativity and commerce. Be sure to take a timely glance at an excerpt from the book here before reading the full account of Godard’s donation at internet technoculture site Boing Boing, the first to translate the news.