Arrrghhh Pirates. Let's think about piracy for a moment, as in classic piracy on the high seas, not Johnny Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean. You see in the olden days, pirates used ships to sail the high seas and then find other ships carrying valuable cargo, and commence an intricate battle that may or may not involve swashbucking swordfights. They boarded those ships and pillaged and plundered and stole the cargo. Let's be clear here, they removed the cargo, depriving the rightful owner of the cargo the rights of ownership. So chests of pieces of eight, and baubles of gemstones etc. were taken. That is piracy.

Flash forward to the days of Yahoo! instead of yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, and we get the label piracy attached to just about anything. But in the case of the Internet, or as former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once said, the tubes, piracy has morphed from an action that deprives ownership to one that simply deprives profit. That's a whole lot of important distinction.

You see, making a copy of something doesn't deprive ownership. The original is safe in the hands of whomever owns it. But now another replica exists. So instead of one person enjoying the use of let's say, a post card of a bottle of rum, two or more people can enjoy the same postcard. There is no loss of ownership.

But wait, you say, what about if the original owner wanted to sell that postcard. If there are all these copies that you can get for free, no one will buy the original. Well that's an interesting philosophy there. But we already know what happens when massive amounts of copies get made that are free. What happens is that more people become aware of the original and not surprisingly, want to buy it. We know this because of the lowly VHS tape. Remember those?

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