Piracy shows the way to innovation

Interesting theory brought up on Torrent Freak today about how piracy is a road to innovation, with some interesting side commentary from Techdirt on the subject.

While the history of piracy has been well established and discussed on multiple forums, the idea of the current copyright corundum conundrum has brought many people to the point, depending on your definition of piracy, that most of us engage in some form of piracy on a day to day basis to do things. Either enjoy media and entertainment, write, do email, or watch some TV show we missed last night because it was on too late.

There are many ways of looking at piracy, from the almost cart blanche that Antigua has been given to pirate American copyrights from the WTO to Brazils need to manufacture AIDS drugs for their population. American history is replete with examples of piracy and how it drove innovation and developed entire industries that subsequently worked on establishing their own copyrights on material or processes.

While in general we do not condone piracy as a general way of doing things, there are examples where it has developed whole new industries. Bittorrent started off as an obscure program that mushroomed via P2P style file sharing and is now the fundamental basis for the Bittorrent legal download system. P2P system like e-donkey worked out the bugs that Joost is based on; Vonage has been busted repeatedly in court for copyright violations, but has developed a business that is giving everyone in VOIP a run for their money.

Microsoft has often been accused of the same thing.

This makes some interesting conversation around piracy and how it has influenced nearly every industry that we have in the USA right now. Well worth reading and stopping for a moment to think about the implications, and what we are doing in relationship to how we interact with many day to day objects and files.

01/13/2008 - reader mark points out that we can’t spell, which is cool, thanks mark.