These are exceptionally useful tools, firstly for events of where source files have gone missing and changes are needed. Tools like this can also be exceptionally useful for learning purposes, where one can see the source of a SWF to gather a greater understanding of how to create their own similar applications or see a different way of thinking. It is hard to work in a vacuum, and what better way is there to learn, other than from seeing what others do? Someone once said something like, it’s the dwarf that can see the furthest when standing on the shoulders of giants.

This is exceptionally useful, however it seems all too easy for people to cross from learning from others to stealing from others… Many people just find it too easy to copy and paste. The dwarfs are now trying to be the giants…

Whatever happened to the pride of achieving something, of presenting work to the world knowing that it hatched from the egg of your own creativity?

With this sharing of information and information being so freely available, comes the issue of the violation of intellectual property laws and infringement of copyright laws. Currently there is a law suit against The Pirate Bay for their involvement in the alleged infringements of these laws.

This could prove a vital case in terms of the governance of the transfer and sharing of information across the internet, as effectively The Pirate Bay is in fact an indexing service. It holds no information that is copy written or protected, but rather searches through descriptions of files (also not containing any protected material) uploaded to the site by users, and retrieves the description searched for. The files containing protected content are stored on the users’ machines and therefore are out of the control of The Pirate Bay.

Google, the biggest search engine in the world is also at its core a simple indexing service which is used to find information and therefore facilitate the accessibility of information. Through its page indexing and retrieval systems, one can find all of the information which is held by The Pirate Bay, therefore if The Pirate Bay is found guilty, wouldn’t that mean that Google is just as guilty?

This could change the way that Google and in fact all search engines will have to index their sites, having to have their search results, having to moderate the search results and exclude many search results for fear of seeming to encourage copyright infringement. Is this then not taking a step back from where we are now and breaking away from what the Internet is all about?