«When record companies make a fuss about the danger of "piracy", they're not talking about violent attacks on shipping. What they complain about is the sharing of copies of music, an activity in which millions of people participate in a spirit of cooperation. The term "piracy" is used by record companies to demonize sharing and cooperation by equating them to kidnaping, murder and theft...»

« Yesterday, Microsoft announced something they called "Global Anti-Piracy Day".

"...Some people have highlighted this tension between different uses of the word for a long time. Richard ­Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and a notorious linguistic stickler, has a long list of words he finds troubling (including "free", "creator" and "ecosystem"). He believes that piracy has always been a propaganda term when used by publishers..."

Continuing with our series on anti-piracy and how to overcome it, we'll today look at the core of piracy in PCs -- the Operating System.

A frequent meme in piracy trash talking is that piracy is linked to malware (example). If your child is downloading pirated material (so the argument goes) they will be downloading it from a malware infected site and infecting their own computer resulting in poor performance, data loss and ID theft. A variant of this argument is that the downloads expose the kids to evil pornographers.

It might seem like something of an odd question, unless your idea of a good night in is a box of popcorn and a copy of some dodgy DVD featuring a Captain Jack lookalike doing unmentionable things to his crew. Yet the answer is that these two things, the illegal file-sharing we commonly refer to as piracy and the porn business, have loads more in common than you might imagine.

Software piracy statistics scream for attention every May when the Business Software Alliance (BSA) releases its piracy report. Its angst is understandable when it rues that almost half of the estimated one billion personal computers (PCs) have pirated/unlicensed software, resulting in losses of $48 billion — an increase of six times over the 2007 figures.

Ars Technica's Ken Fisher suggested in his article, WGA failure highlights major flaw in Microsoft's anti-piracy strategy, that Microsoft needs a new "anti-piracy" strategy. I not only agree that they need a new strategy, I'll even go so far as to help them craft it.

A recent crack-down on piracy in Kenya has driven a number of internet cafes to open source.