OK, Space Pirates. Which Science Fiction author introduced the idea of Space Pirates?
When? (I suspect the 1930s.)
Which magazine?
What was the title of the first story with Space Pirates?
Do not ARRR! this one off. You’ll use up all the Oxy in your suit bottle, matey!
Don’t know the answer…but really, really love the genre!
Wikipedia has a List of space pirates. There, the earliest one is Lucky Starr and the Pirates of the Asteroids from 1953.
A start, but I suspect not the ultimate answer.
Nope.
The Red Peri was found in 1935.
The earliest story I can find with space pirate in the title is “The Space Pirate” by Eando Binder in the June 1938 Amazing Stories.
The Red Peri has now been added to the Wiki page that I cited.
I’ll check tomorrow, but I’d be surprised if space pirates don’t show up the E.E. Smith’s Skylark series, and that’s from 1927-1930.
I missed the edit window, but Triplanetary from 1933 was crawling with space pirates.
I was also thinking Triplanetary, but wondering if Killer Kane of Buck Rogers could be considered a pirate.
He started writing Skylark back in 1915. It’s considered the first space opera, and the first example of fictional interstellar travel.
I don’t recall space pirates in it, but I shall have to re-read it to be sure.
In Skylark of Space, Chapter 7, “The Trial Voyage” Richard Seaton does refer to Duquesne and his minions as “that gang of pirates” and beefs up the armor and weaponry on the good spaceship Skylark in anticipation of conflict.
I think that constitutes space pirates. 
I was wrong. E.E. Smith’s Skylark series has three mentions of the word pirate, but in every case the context is that of a Terrestrial one. Not a Caribbean pirate, more of an industrial one, pirating inventions and processes. Smith’s Lensman series has the first space pirates I was able to find and that was in 1933.
IMHO, it had to be more than industrial piracy to make Dick Seaton want to add more armor and weaponry to his spaceship.
I hate to break up a good brawl, but if Blackie Duquesne is a threat merely to Smith and not generally to every ship in the spaceways, then he’s an enemy - not a pirate. And there weren’t any other ships in space.
Then he was a threat to every other ship in space, no? 
Now we’re cookin with gas.
Earlier examples?
Every other ship? You mean just the even ones or the odd ones?
Even the even ones were odd back then.
If Skylark isn’t officially the first “pirates in space” story, it should be the first unofficial one.