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computer Piracy

Software piracy was considered a "major problem" when the first Bulletin Board Servers were started in the seventies and the Internet was young.
The future Bill Gates and Steve Jobs starting up their offices and software firms in the tiny vineyard towns of central California scrambled for every penny for their wares.

Operating systems, word processors, and spreadsheet management applications were priced in the several hundreds of dollars, and for some computer savvy youth to simply copy the small files (5-1/4 inch floppies held about 400KB) off the disk and upload them onto a publicly accessable hub created a noticeable dip in profits. It could even mean bankruptcy in the cut-throat beginnings of Silicon Valley.

Hence the BBS server and pirated software became friends in a war against the PC Software entrepreneur at the dawn of the computer age. As the Internet expanded into the creation of the World Wide Web in 1992, and websites grew out of the ashes of the BBS, software piracy found a new parent and mushroomed. And as a new class of billionaires and robber-barons rose out of the giant successes of Microsoft and Apple, and ten times as many lesser millionaires were made, software piracy was only further nursed on an ever increasing and demanding market looking for software cheaper – if not for free.

A market that ensnared the world.

Piracy has matured and grown with the same gargantuan leaps and bounds of the Internet and profit. The American software industry lost $12 billion in 1998 to piracy, including a estimated 450,000 jobs -- and youths who knowlingly distribute the stolen wares can be found in every other house on your common neighborhood block all throughout America and Europe. But more important, and frightening, are the electronic and geographic borders it has crossed, as well as its foreign legitimization.

Piracy has capitalized a global blackmarket, one that has assumed distribution and control of software goods in countries that do not participate in American copyright conventions.

In Ukraine, one such "rogue nation," Microsoft Windows 2000 can be purchased from a Kievan street vendor, packaged and stamped with the official imprimateur, for $12. Bill Gates earns not a penny from the sale, and for the common denizen, he little knows that he is assisting an organized crime that uses such sophisticated methods of piracy as to seem legitimate. Little better can be said for policies other states in the former Soviet Union.

In Asia, such vending and industrial piracy has led Silicon Valley to lobby Congress to place heavy fines and sanctions on trade with the Orient.

In 1975 it was an unlikely prediction that software piracy would be today's economic divide and perhaps one of the most contentious issues between America and the East. In the age before the personal computer, piracy was at most the desktop conflict between employed software developers and unemployed hackers. That simple "virus" has grown into the base of a new form of global economic discord that strikes at the center of one of America's most profitable capitalist interests.

© Copyright 2003 by ArtArabia.com

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