piracy

This Spiegel Online article rather stopped me in my tracks. Acclaimed architect Zaha Hadid is currently designing 11 projects across China including the quite beautiful Wangjing SOHO complex in Beijing. It seems that in the land where anything can be copied, architectural 'pirates' have cloned the design of the complex and construction teams are busy building a replica in faraway Chongqing.

If you think the copyright wars over SOPA and PIPA that resulted in the Wikipedia Blackout were contentious, wait until you see what happens when the debate over copyright is extended beyond music, film, video games and books and into the realm of physical objects like sneakers and toys.

Not science fiction anymore, this: "Once chairs and other things become content, the prospect of rampant chair piracy turns from unimaginable into very real." The Pirate Bay is opening a new category for the new kind of piratable stuff: "We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles.