While pirates were once seafaring robbers, these days the more common definition is "one who infringes another's copyright or business rights or who broadcasts without authorization" – selling software, music or computer game CDs from a market stall in the East End or via P2P across the Internet.

One doesn't have to approve of illegal copying to realize that this definition covers a multitude of sins, some of which, paradoxically, work to the advantage of the owners of the copyright, and some of which reflect changing cultural perceptions of the ownership of ideas.

The most common myths attached to the notion of copyright piracy are that the music, film and software industry profits are fatally compromised by P2P networks and MP3 downloads, that each unit distributed in this way results in an equivalent loss for the industries concerned, and that there is never a gain for the copyright holders in the illicit distribution of their products.

Revenues have taken a dip – and copying may be complicit in this – but piracy can produce some benefits, and business knows it. More importantly, a significant number of users participate in the downloading, sharing and copying of computer files, and the network and mobile technologies that make this possible cannot be ‘uninvented’.

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