piracy

Piracy comes from Medieval Latin pīrātia, itself from Classical Latin pīrāta plus the suffix -ia, or from Ancient Greek πειρατεία (peirateía).

Between 1660 and 1710, England's Crown gave the Stationers' Company a strict monopoly on printing books, and anyone who printed without permission was cast as attacking the Crown's authority — so unauthorized printers were branded 'pirates,' equating them with sea robbers. By the Statute of Anne in 1710, this sense of unauthorized duplication was firmly fixed in public consciousness, and later carried over smoothly to new media as they appeared.

The word is directly built on pīrāta, the Latin root that gives English 'pirate' — the sea-robber sense came first, and the book-copying sense was borrowed from it.