Current Word

Tuesday, March 14th, 2006

Pirating Software

It used to be a niche art for uber geeks on their Apple ][‘s, cranking down bits on their Applecats. Ascii Express and GBBS boards kept our plastic disk rollo-decks filled with the latest games and software. Nobody cared back then, most software companies probably didn’t even know it was going on. Then later in the early 90′s, it was the IRC and Warez channels. I spent more time on #warez5 than I did chasing girls. Today it’s a little bit different. The Google of pirated software, The Pirate Bay just got sued today. But being based in Sweden and not actually hosting any illegal content, just pointers to illegal content, may keep them out of harms way for quite some time to come.

UPDATE Thomas Hawk points me over to their “legal department”, complete with all the legal letters they’ve received from American companies apparently trying to enforce the DMCA in Sweden. Lots of luck guys.

Hello and thank you for contacting us. We have shut down the website in
question.

Oh wait, just kidding.

We haven’t, since the site in question is fully legal. Unlike certain other countries, such as the one you’re in, we have sane copyright laws here.

But we also have polar bears roaming the streets and attacking people .