Angola’s Wikipedia Pirates Are Exposing the Problems with Digital Colonialism

Here's one way to look at it: Given what Western nations have done to their country and region, why should Angolans care about Westerners' intellectual property?

i.e., 'You kidnapped and enslaved our people, colonized our country, financed and supported a brutal civil war that caused over 500,000 deaths - and now you say we should worry about your intellectual property?'

Thank you for the constructive answers

I am from Brazil, when I was young, I pirated HEAVILY, and frequently without being even aware of it, there was legal legit stores selling pirated stuff and even paying taxes for it, maybe unaware too that it was pirated...

For example, I paid what is equivalent today (inflation corrected) 17 USD to get the DEMO copy of Wolfenstein 3D.

And to me, paying 17 USD for the DEMO of Wolfenstein 3D, was the coolest stuff ever, because I could play it in first place!

When I heard of "doom", the "legendary game that is wolfenstein 3D but with green floors that cause damage and bloody monsters", I wanted it badly... All I could find about it was hearsay, no legal copies, even of a demo existed, no pirated copies existed either! The few people that played it was only on someone else computer, they described it to me, and I really wanted to see it, they described a technical marvel, something awesome!

My dad is a engineer, he was hired by Kia Motors to do some contract stuff for them, he found out that the CEO (or president, or some other extremely high level executive, forgot the details, I was just a kid) of Brazil Kia Motors had a imported legal copy of Doom, and Doom2, he mentioned to the guy, and he made a copy for me, 20 floppies.

I took care of them like if they were the most precious things ever, because floppies that I had were easy to corrupt, and Doom, and Doom2 was too priceless to lose, and it took too much work to get it (I ended visiting Kia motors with my dad several times, and helping a bit when I was allowed to, the total effort to get the thing was something like several months of visiting Kia a lot, nagging people, paying attention, helping install steel cable structures...).

And it was worth it, Doom was legendary as I imaginated in my head (even using PC Speaker audio, because a real sound car costed here about 20 times the monthly mininum wage), I wanted to make it too, I wanted to be a programmer able to create my own Doom, I needed to learn C, and whatnot, the game was fun, and working a lot to get that pirated copy was very worth it.

Then I wonder, what would have happened if Doom and Doom2 had some strong DRM that prevented the Kia executive from making a copy for me?

Makes me wonder if someone's hacked together an IP-over-wikimedia or IP-over-facebook solution yet...

Not hard at all, just shut it down.