Jackard Woven Patterns - The First Invention of Software Piracy

In 1890, a German-American inventor named Herman Hollerith devised a solution to the United States Census Bureau's problem of counting all the new immigrants. He came up with a system where if each individual's information was punched on cards, it could be processed more quickly. In Jackard's time, people stole these control cards because they represented patterns that if the patterns were popular could be very lucrative to keep making.