Time magazine's Lev Grossman's got a great profile of four authors of notorious software tools that formed the nexus of the last 12 years of copyright cold-wars: Bram Cohen (BitTorrent), Jon "DVD Jon" Johansen, Justin Frankel (Gnutella) and Shawn Fanning ("Napster").
So what ever happened to the pirate apocalypse of yesteryear? In the U.S., piracy hasn't turned out to be quite as bad for content producers as everybody thought. A report by the U.S. Government Accountability Office released last April labored mightily to establish a strong link between piracy and lost sales, but the results were inconclusive.
What's striking about the pirate kings is that they've been much less successful in the straight world than they were as pirates. An anarchic worldview coupled with brilliant code doesn't travel as well as you'd think in the bean-counting world of legitimate commerce. Good code empowers users by giving them choices and options, but empowered users aren't necessarily good for business. What you need to hit it really big in legitimate commerce is an authoritarian sensibility that limits users to doing what you want them to.
(Thanks, Airshowfan, via Submitterator!)
