Regardless of this, I've always been fundamentally against software piracy. I used to work in retail peddling audio recording software, and there were hundreds of little companies generating incredible software plug-ins for doing DSP software for the major platforms. This was in the nascent days of Napster and the like, and it was far more common to see people sharing copies of these software plug-ins in newsgroups.
In the end, the rampant piracy put all of these great little software entrepreneurs out of business - because no one had to pay for their software. Maybe they were at fault for not engineering their software securely enough, but hey - in a very real sense they were still victims of intellectual property theft. Today, the world is worse off for their absence - no new developments, no new patches, no innovative plugins, no new businesses in this area - end of story.
That being said, I can't help but take a look at articles like this one on
Yahoo! News - Does File Trading Fund Terrorism? and just think to myself, "Are these people crazy?" Despite all my belief in capitalism and the power of putting your money where your mouth is, when someone like
John G. Malcolm, deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division of the U.S. Department of Justice, did say there seems to be some connection between illegal copying and organized crime, in that many of the groups profiting from illegal copies are highly organized and can have international distribution networks. Organized crime often supports terrorism, he suggested. "These groups will not hesitate to threaten or injure those who tend to interfere with their operations," Malcolm said.Well, I think that's just plain ridiculous. Terrorism indeed...
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