intellectual property piracy digital

A Question Before We Begin

I want you to stop for a moment before you read on.

Imagine you invented something. It doesn’t have to be anything grand — maybe a clever solution to a small problem, or a recipe you refined over years, inherited from your grandmother and slowly made your own. Imagine you spent time and effort and perhaps money on it. Then imagine someone on the other side of the world copied it, sold it, and profited from it — without paying you a cent, without mentioning your name.

How does that feel?

Now flip the image. Imagine you are poor, or you live in a sanctioned country, or in a society where certain books and films and medicines haven’t reached you — because their prices are multiples of your monthly income. And some authority tells you: this belongs to us, and we alone decide when you can have it and at what price.

How does that feel now?

Between these two images lives a very old philosophical question, one that has taken on a sharp new digital edge: What does it mean to own an idea? And is intellectual property — as currently practiced — genuine justice, or is it selective justice that serves the powerful and burdens the weak?

This is not an article defending piracy. But it is not an article defending the current system either. It is an attempt to understand — with honesty and some intellectual courage — why hundreds of millions of people around the world do not feel that piracy is a moral crime, even when they know it is a legal violation.

Coca-Cola Doesn’t Register Its Recipe

In 1886, American pharmacist John Pemberton invented a carbonated drink that would become the most consumed beverage in human history. But a critical decision was made along the way: the chemical formula of this drink would never be filed as a patent. Why?

Because filing a patent means — by law — publicly disclosing the details of your invention. A patent offers roughly twenty years of legal monopoly, after which the formula enters the public domain and anyone can use it. Coca-Cola chose a different path entirely: preserving the formula as a “trade secret” whose protection never expires as long as the secret is kept.

Today, multiple sources report that Coca-Cola’s formula is kept in a vault in Atlanta, Georgia, that only two people in the entire world know the complete formula at any given time, and that these two individuals are never permitted to travel together on the same flight.

The public doesn’t know the recipe. But the public buys the drink at Coca-Cola’s price, not at the cost of its ingredients. The company maintains its market dominance not through any formal legal instrument, but through permanent secrecy.

A patent requires you to disclose in exchange for protection. A trade secret allows you to monopolize forever in exchange for nothing. What is the difference between these two models from the perspective of fairness?

That is a fundamental question. The law says companies have the right to keep their trade secrets. That is a legitimate right. But it also reveals something important: the intellectual property system is not designed to protect ideas as abstract human values — it is designed to protect commercial interests. And that is a critical distinction.

Patent Protection: For Whom, Exactly?

Imagine a small inventor — an individual or a startup — who develops a technology and decides to patent it in the United States. The filing alone can cost between two thousand and ten thousand dollars in some cases, and the process can take years. But that is only the beginning.

An American patent does not protect the inventor in Japan. Or Germany. Or Brazil. Each country has its own legal system, its own fees, its own timelines. Registering a single patent in twenty countries can cost a hundred thousand dollars or more — a sum that is simply out of reach for an individual or small company.

So what happens when a large Chinese firm reads the American patent — legally disclosed, by law — and develops a similar product under a different name with slightly modified technical details? In many cases, it can do so entirely legally within its own borders, provided the patent was not registered locally.

Large corporations understand this. So they register patents everywhere possible and employ armies of lawyers to protect their rights. The small inventor, by contrast, is usually protected only in the markets they can afford to cover legally — which is almost always just their home market.

TRIPS: When Law Became a Weapon

In 1994, during the Uruguay Round of trade negotiations, the TRIPS Agreement was born — the Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights. It was the first international framework legally binding all World Trade Organization members in the area of intellectual property.

What did this agreement say, in brief? That developing countries must apply the same intellectual property protection standards as developed nations. Software protection, copyright, patents, pharmaceutical rights — all subject to uniform international standards.

This sounds fair at first glance. But consider the context: the developed countries themselves — the United States, Europe, Japan — were not bound by these standards during their own great industrial growth periods. Nineteenth-century America copied British literary works wholesale without paying royalties. Post-war Japan benefited enormously from Western technologies, absorbed them, and developed something better from them.

Today, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) describes TRIPS as “the relentless expansion of intellectual property from the developed world to the developing world.” Countries like Brazil, India, and Thailand opposed it from the start, seeing it as a restriction on the legislative flexibility they needed to build their own economies.

The clearest case came with AIDS medications in the 1990s: major Western pharmaceutical companies held patents on life-saving drugs and refused to allow the manufacture of affordable generic versions in Africa, where tens of thousands were dying every year. When South Africa attempted to pass legislation enabling compulsory licensing of these drugs, the United States threatened it with trade sanctions.

Intellectual property was not an abstract legal formality here — it was, literally, a matter of life and death.

When someone asks my position on piracy, I ask them first: do you think the laws governing it were designed to protect you? Or to protect the interests of those who wrote them?

And Chinese Companies?

Many people ask: why do Chinese companies produce products similar to Western ones at far lower prices? Is this a violation of intellectual property rights?

The answer is not simple. Chinese companies are primarily bound by Chinese domestic law. Western patents are often filed in China late or incompletely. And in many sectors, Chinese companies today are genuine innovators — TikTok, Huawei, and BYD were not built through copying. They were built through research, development, and massive investment.

But the deeper question is this: what is the difference between a Chinese company developing a product “inspired by” an American one within its legal jurisdiction — and America itself, which copied European literature freely throughout the nineteenth century? The winners write the rules. And the rules written by powerful nations protect what those nations already own.

Zorro, Jack Sparrow, and the Noble Pirate

Across virtually every human culture — from ancient Arab stories to Inca legends, from Romani folklore to English literature — there is a recurring archetype: the noble pirate, the righteous thief, the just rebel.

Robin Hood steals from the rich to give to the poor. Zorro defies corrupt authority in the name of the oppressed. Jack Sparrow lives outside the law but carries his own code of honor. Even in Arab heritage, figures like Ali Baba and the trickster heroes of folk tales celebrate cleverness against greed.

Why do these figures hold heroic status in our collective imagination? Not because people love crime — but because people understand intuitively that some laws exist to protect the powerful rather than to achieve justice. When someone appears who defies those laws and gives what they take to those in need — or simply makes available to everyone what was once reserved for those who could pay — it finds a deep resonance in the human psyche.

This does not mean every act of theft is heroic. But it means that piracy culture — when it arises and thrives — is not an accident. It is a symptom of a system in which many people feel excluded from access to what they regard as their natural human right.

In the digital space, as we explored in our piece on digital identity, the absence of physical deterrence changes how people navigate moral choices — ethics become a test of consciousness rather than fear.

When the Exception Becomes the Rule

There is a legitimate objection here: doesn’t this logic justify all forms of infringement? If we accept that “necessity” sanctions piracy, who draws the line?

That is a valid question. And answering it requires distinguishing between three very different things.

The first: commercially motivated piracy — a company copies a product and sells it cheaper, appropriating profit that rightly belongs to others. This is a clear economic violation with direct and measurable harm to the original creator.

The second: access piracy — an individual downloads a film or book or program they cannot afford, either because the price exceeds their means or because the product is simply unavailable in their country. Here, the direct economic harm to the rights holder is far less clear — those sales would not have occurred anyway.

The third: knowledge piracy against monopoly — as with medicines and scientific research tools. Here the question becomes sharper still: is intellectual property an absolute right when it conflicts with life itself?

The intellectual property system acknowledges this complexity. TRIPS itself permits what is known as “compulsory licensing” — allowing countries to produce medicines without the patent holder’s permission in public health emergencies. And as digital ownership technologies like NFTs emerge, these questions multiply further: what does it mean to own a digital copy of something?

Intellectual property is a noble idea at its core: respecting the effort of the creator and allowing them to benefit from their work. But when it becomes a tool of monopoly — when laws are deployed to protect those who own rather than those who create — that nobility is lost.

The Difficult Admission

I write all of this knowing it does not justify every act called piracy. Because some piracy is genuine injustice too.

When a film is recorded in a theater with a phone and a poor-quality copy floods the internet the next day, the artists who spent years making it suffer real harm — the technicians who worked on its lighting, sound, and distribution. When a novel is copied in full and distributed freely, the young writer who earned almost nothing from writing in the first place may lose a slim chance at continuing.

The small writer is not Coca-Cola. The independent musician is not Warner Records. The indie developer is not Microsoft. These distinctions matter enormously — and ignoring them turns good intellectual critique into convenient rationalization.

But the genuinely difficult admission — from the other direction — is this: the intellectual property system as currently practiced was not primarily designed to protect the small writer or the independent musician. It was designed to protect the rights holder, the distributor, the one who funds production and pays the lawyers. And those people — most of the time — are not the original creators.

This is what keeps the question alive. Even as new technologies like blockchain promise to return control directly to creators, the economic infrastructure of intellectual property still tilts toward the large.

In Part Two

Everything above was necessary for what comes next. Because talking honestly about EgyBest — the Egyptian website that became a legend of the Arab internet, and the film that tried to recapture that legend — requires this context to be firmly in place.

We lived through genuine cultural scarcity. This was not about luxury. It was about access to human culture in its most basic sense. And when EgyBest threw open a door to what had been reserved for the few, it did so in a way that still raises questions that refuse to go quiet.

In Part Two of this essay, we will talk about that website, the film that made it into a cinematic legend, and the memory that an entire generation carries of an experience that was — for all its moral complexity — an indelible part of how they came to know the world.

References

🌐 Read this article in Arabic

Intellectual Property & Piracy | The Philosopher and the Pirates

A Question Before We Begin