These are a small and rather confused tribe of imps who run around with patches over both eyes, and making noises like ‘Avast, ye lubbers’ and ‘Shiver me timbers’. Their leader is Wrong John Sliver, who shivered the timbers of the wooden leg of Long John Silver, and took one piece to use as a weapon. Wrong John Sliver used to be called Crême Caramel Budweiser, which he did not like. So as well as a bit of Silver’s leg, he took a close imitation of the name. He made it just different enough to avoid a law suit, which is a boring black gown that only goth ravens would wear.

Copywrong pirates like to wear the most colourful clothes they can find, buy or steal, because this annoys the visigoths. Copywrong pirates hate the visigoths because they are original. You can tell if there has been a flock of copywrong pirates in your refrigerator, because everything is the same colour, a sort of cross between buff and beige, all that is left after they steal the colours.

Copywrong pirates can often be heard at night, rounding up original ideas that are left on bedroom floors. They steal them and give them new names, and sell them as their own, but they never get them right, which explains their name. They live on just one food, rum and raisin ice cream, because they believe it is what real pirates eat. They hate cold food, and this explains their bad tempers.

Copywrong pirates all have crossbows, but they always load their special crossbow arrows (which they call blots) back to front, which makes the blot so confused that it flies sideways, so they never hit anybody, and this makes the bows more livid than cross. Most of the time, you won’t actually see the copywrong pirates, but the signs of their presence are obvious. They put books in bookshelves upside down or spine-side in, which makes them a real nuisance in libraries. Most of them have names beginning with R, but as you will realise, Wrong John Sliver is a poor speller.

The only clever thing that Wrong John Sliver ever did was to persuade librarians that he and his followers were really called copyright pirates, which means information about them is always filed in the wrong place.

ORIGINS: Many of the copywrong pirates seem to be the descendants of cloned imps, produced at the Imperial Farm of Vlad the Imp-aler by the evil Count Henry Blenkinsop. Vlad wanted something tasty to dunk in his coffee, and ended up producing something not unlike Spam. They wanted to be copyright pirates, which would be even nastier, but even Vlad hated copyright piracy, so he had Blenkinsop give them an extra nose on each foot.

SIZE: About the same size as a garden gnome on steroids, but with very big egos and very small brains. They are very skinny, because they hate their food.

UNUSUAL THINGS: Because they wear patches over both eyes, their noses (the ones on their heads) are usually bleeding and spread across their faces. Their names all start with the letter R.

IS A THREAT TO: Original thinkers, inventors. They are a definite nuisance to coffee drinkers, because they steal people’s coffee, thinking it is called ‘copy’. This really gets up the noses of pudding monsters, or would, if pudding monsters had noses.

USES: None at all, unless you have a large supply of rum and raisin ice cream that has passed its ‘use by’ date.

HATES: The letters © and ®, pudding monsters, original thinkers. Their biggest hate is rum and raisin ice cream. Because of where their extra noses are, they really hate the smell of old socks.

LIKES: Any sort of copying device. They really like the letter that they call ARRRRRRR, and aardvarks. They are very fond of the part of the alphabet between Q and S.

This monster is most easily recognised by the patches over both eyes, the bad teeth (you can’t see to brush your teeth when both your eyes are closed) and the battered noses.