Despite the spectacular congressional flop that was SOPA and PIPA, “piracy” is still a dirty word to most, with file-sharing sites like the Pirate Bay remaining in the eye of the storm and, of course, that made-for-TV takedown of Megaupload making international headlines a few weeks ago. It’s fair to predict we should expect more battles in the name of copyright protection in the near future, but computer historian and writer Benj Edwards has a somewhat different take. He thinks that the debate should focus less on the immediate impacts of piracy, and that history would benefit from taking a longer view on the issue. His article ‘Why History Needs Software Piracy’ appears on the website Technologizer.
