I know this blog post is a bit tardy, yet I still want to write about it. As four Swedish men – Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Varg, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundstroem – now face imprisonment regarding copyright infringement for their involvement behind The Pirate Bay, one would wonder if this will be the beginning of the end for software piracy. It won’t. Ha. Not even close. While there’ll be a wide barrage of media attention on the trial and will likely be a landmark occasion in the piracy world, software piracy will never end. No matter how quick you cut off one head of the hydra, another three will likely take its place. (The Globe and Mail has a great interview with one of TPB’s honchos here)

In fact, piracy seems to be something that’s been around my whole life. When I grew up in Singapore around the 1990’s, it was commonplace to see shops in malls with photocopied manuals and 3.5 inch floppies with handwritten notes written on them. In high school, it was “black disks” or “demon disks” and Warez BBS’s. Later, when I first logged onto the Internet, it became IRC, Napster, Kazaa, Soulseek and ultimately Bit Torrent.

There’s a number of reasons I think the reason piracy has always evolved and maintained its billion-dollar stranglehold on the software industry. These have likely been mentioned before so hear with me.

The first, is that you can’t argue with free. People will always consider getting their software for free if they can do it easily. Another is how clicking a link or two doesn’t exactly feel the same like taking a physical object out of a store and running away with it, no matter how much the Business Software Alliance would like to convince you that it is. My favourite reason, however,  is the punk rock mentality these kids who actively find ways of hacking the system have. Eff the man, indeed.There’s also the lack of enforcable legislation, lack of ISP control through deep packet inspection and so forth.

Although it’s fairly big in North America and Europe, the problem is exasberated in the Middle East, which has seen losses to software piracy rise fivefold since 2002, according to this document. While this is likely a whole other argument entirely, this is indeed a global phenomenon. No amount of software locks will be able to stop piracy from occurring wherever you are.

The major irony is that peer-to-peer (P2P) sharing, the foundation of which illegal software downloads has been built on, now has a legit business model – be it through iTunes, Hulu, Joost, Skype or any other legal software application. As noted by PC Mag’s Dan Costa, fighting technological revolutions with clumsy legal actions will never, ever work.

These tactics discourage industries from innovating, developing creative business models, and offering customers better solutions. If the executives of the music industry would only spend as much time and money taking advantage of digital technologies as they do fighting them, maybe they could build the next iTunes. Or Boxee. Or BitTorrent.

The fight over controlling content over Bit Torrent is ultimately a doomed one, but the technology behind it is something that businesses should be picking up and running with. We are beginning to see that adoption with the CBC distributing shows on it (leading to another copyright debate entirely) and game distribution engines like Valve, but only when a major company such as Microsoft, Google, or Oprah puts its support behind it can something like this step out from the shadows and into the mainstream.