Fergus Cassidy

Avast ye!

AS far as nostalgia goes, this much is true.

When we were children we went to the matinee in the cinema most Saturdays. While a cowboy movie corralled our attention, we stuffed our faces with popcorn, Star Crushes and Curly Wurlys. In between we roared our little heads off. At anything at all but especially the Indians.

Did we love those Indians. As soon as the hordes of Cheyenne or Cherokee came over the hill all hell would break loose and the restraint of the cinema staff along with it. Alas, Geronimo's gang usually came off the worst in battle no matter how fervently we willed them on.

The same couldn't be said though for one of our other favourite 'baddies', the pirates. Back then, you would never hear a bad word said about pirates. Great lads altogether, singing away as they relieved more bountiful booty from another of Her Majesty's vessels.

Even pirates have to move on and, in time, the became more adventurous. Sailing the dead seas of radio predictability, it wasn't long before the pirates hoisted their Jolly Roger on some valuable bits of wavelength.

The huge success of the pirate stations couldn't be ignored and they eventually prised open the airwaves and ushered in the commercial stations. Most of the pirates even found gainful employment there and could finally unbuckle their swashes.

Pirate ratio was glorious. Manic, disorganised and treacherous it may have been, but it was always exciting. I knew a few of them and they were hardy souls.

Swinging out of church steeple on a Sunday morning hurriedly rearranging a makeshift antenna to stop 'Dearg Doom' from bewildering the congregation below. Going around rubbish skips collecting unwanted mattresses, then arranged to cushion the fall of a transmitter from the sixth floor. When the Posts and Telegraph's men came calling, gravity was the only hope for pirates.

Nonetheless, the stations spread faster than a legit DJ's waistline. They split, regrouped and split again. At times, there was a station for everyone in the audience.

Calling most of the them stations, by the way, was more an act of imagination than anything else. One crumbling Barna shed in Aunty Mary's back garden does not a station make. There was another one underneath the De Lux cinema on Camden Street, which required bent-double negotiation of a labyrinthine warren of heating and ventilation ducts and half the rat population of Dublin.

Blame it on the movies, blame it on the rebelliousness of youth, but the movie pirates and those of the airwaves were, once upon a time, heroes all. Characters for whom there was always, at least, grudging admiration. Rough diamonds maybe, but they were never 'the baddies'. Until now.

The knives were out for pirates over the last few years but recently the roar of cannons can be heard in the distance. A flotilla of battleships from the movie and music industries have appeared on the horizon and are awaiting further orders.

Last Wednesday some of the biggest computing and entertainment ships afloat banded together under a flag of convenience. Their mission: to create anti-copying technology for future home entertainment networks. The armada includes the likes of IBM, Intel, Sony, Microsoft, Warners and Walt Disney.

That former foes have come together like this means there is something unusual going on. It was the hardware companies which facilitated the storing of stuff in the first place, on tape or hard drive.

Did the cassette and video tape recorder manufacturers care a jot about the television or music companies' precious merchandise? Not a bit of it. So much so that Sony, on losing out to the VHS tape standard, added a record company (Columbia) to its stable, lest history repeat itself.

So who are the pirates? Is selling computers equipped with DVD burners piracy? What about DVD recorders for television programmes? And what about software companies, well okay Microsoft then, continuing to shovel out browser software which has undeniably contributed to insecure networks and computers? Recently Cert, America's top security advisory agency, urged people to stop using Internet Explorer.

Microsoft aren't alone in making it very difficult to tell the good guys from the bad. While some of the biggest software companies blather on about how much software piracy is costing them, what about how much shoddy software is costing those who have paid good money for it?

As Robert X Cringely once put it so well: "If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside".

All this bleating about piracy is an attempt, yet again, to separate the 'good guys' from 'the baddies', this time on the digital high seas. And who better than Hollywood - with their new-found computer cohorts - to try and do just that.

So here we go again with the cowboys and Indians caper. It was nonsense back then and even more so today.

Knowing what we do, in hindsight, about the barbarity meted out to Indians, it turns out that our strident support at those Saturday matinees was well-founded and wise beyond our years.

We were probably right about the pirates too.