MummifiedClient5000@feddit.dk 6 days ago
Software piracy existed long before the internet and it simply moved from offline copying to bulletin boards to internet-based FTP sites, Usenet and IRC and such once that became common and now I guess mostly P2P.
Bill Gates famously ranted over hobbyists that copied Altair Basic interpreter that he had part in developing back in 1976. Not the first occurance of piracy either, but maybe the first time anyone actually described it as stealing.
The use of the word “piracy” describing unlicensed copying dates hundreds of years back, to book plagiarism and copying. Much later also applied to music bootlegs.
rowinxavier@lemmy.world 6 days ago
Something to note is in the earlier years of computing software being copy written was not really a thing. The big thing was software for getting a specific piece of hardware to work. Most people were just concerned with getting things working, so when people came along with software they wanted you to pay for it was not really normal. Making the software something you paid for was a change, and so making it difficult to copy or distribute the software was not incentivised.
I expect the first breach of license was probably not because of intentional piracy, rather it was probably just a mistake or misunderstanding.