When personal computers first came on the market in the late 70's,
the notion of software was only a few years old, and so software
was not really protected as a published entity or as intellectual
property. The concrete terms defining patent and copyright laws
made it difficult to determine where computer software fit in
the picture until the Computer Software Copyright Act of 1980.
This act copyrights software as a 'literary work.' (Forester,
32) In 1989, the U.S. Patent Office began to issue patents to
programs, prompting questions about patenting mathematical algorithms,
which are normally not given patents. Software is pretty much
considered the intellectual property of the author, but our current
system of law and of copyright/property rights has not yet found
a successful way of protecting a programmer's work.
Software piracy has been commonplace since data storage systems
for computers, such as floppy disks and hard drives, became readily
available to the public. Today, the more publicized cases of software
piracy usually focus on businesses sharing a few copies of software
for many computers and overseas piracy rings who copy and resell
software that is either outrageously expensive or unavailable
in these countries (or is banned from export under US law; see
this text copy of Netscape's user license
for reference.) Then there are a few computer junkies out there
who amass pirated programs on their hard drives like Imelda Marcos
amassed shoes. With the current price of a gigabyte hard drive
at around $300, this has become much easier to do; one can store
over 200 programs on one such drive without much hassle. (A gigabyte
is roughly equal to 1080 megabytes. The average program today
takes up between 2 and 5 megabytes of space. That's a lot of games
you could store on one hard drive. :) ) However, one noteworthy
individual
and his use of university computers to store warez made countless
national headlines.