Understanding why software duplication was such a thorny issue during the early years of the commercial microcomputer software industry requires understanding the status of software copyright in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as setting aside internet-era notions of piracy. Software Piracy at the Dawn of Personal Computing If no one paid for software, they worried, who would bother to write it, and how would the industry grow? As a consumer microcomputing market began to flourish, developers became alert to the risks software piracy posed to their burgeoning industry. Understanding why a group of software publishers might threaten to ruin a niche microcomputer hobbyist magazine over another company’s ad requires understanding the tangled net of industrial tensions that emerged between the producers and the consumers of microcomputer software in the early 1980s. Released by the newly formed Omega Software Systems, an otherwise anonymous publisher with no prior products to its name, Locksmith promised to copy the “uncopyable.” In other words, it allowed users to make duplications of floppy disks that were otherwise locked by the varied copy protection schemes used by publishers as a loss prevention mechanism to thwart piracy. The software publishers who formed a sizable contingent of Tripp’s advertising base were incensed over the Locksmith ad, which they believed served to enable software piracy. Tripp’s editorial was motivated by something that had never happened in the world of microcomputer journalism before: the threat of an advertiser boycott.

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