Humble Beginnings

Piracy and counterfeiting has been widespread since the dawn of artistic expression. In medieval times, counts and kings demanded paintings from high-class painters, but often received forgeries or low-quality replicas. So began the idea of a replica a copy that impersonates the real McCoy.

Digital piracy is much younger. When personal computers first came on the public market in the late 70s, the notion of what role software would play was very different from what it is today. Until the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980, software was not recognized as intellectual property, so there were no laws against theft or reproduction. When the Computer Software Copyright Act was implemented, software was defined as literary work, thereby making programmers the equivalent of modern day literary authors.

In late 1989, the U.S Patent Office began to issue patents to software developers, giving birth to the notion that all digital media is the intellectual property of the author; therefore, the author owned the rights to the compiled program and the underlying source code.

Software piracy s origins are very innocent in nature. Before pirated material became hot property, before the widespread use of the Internet, and even before laptops and CDs, there were computer geeks.

Computer geeks are universal and are the forefathers of software piracy Piracy began in the 1980s when computer technology was still new. Computer software was either for extreme hobbyists or large corporations. The few computer geeks lucky enough to have their own computers at home were few...