Some people talk rubbish...

"all the hard work of crackers and hackers. Without whom none of this would be possible. No PC's, no Internet, no networking"

Firstly, confusing hackers and crackers is a fundamental mistake. Cracking today is essentially aimed at criminality, in either subverting or breaking copyright. It adds nothing to innovation because it can't be legitimately used. Most cracking I've seen today is all directed at some kind of economic gain, such as bypassing the need to purchase software, removing DRM and/or encryption and generally defrauding someone else through property loss.

As far as I know the PC was developed by IBM as a commercial product that didn't rely in any cracking skills. The origins of the Internet go back to the US Department of Defence that again were purely legitimate and had nothing to do with stealing copyright; in fact quite the reverse, Internet RFCs are all open and unrestricted and were not derived from stealing the copyright of others. Most networking is based on either open or proprietary standards where it isn't required to reverse engineer to steal intellectual property.

What we're talking about isn't innovation, it's petty theft from people too cheap to actually purchase the material they want to see; it also funds organised crime when it comes to bootlegging DVDs and movies - I am no friend of a system of copyright that essentially is an extortion racket, however none of us should be so stupid to think that criminals aren't making money from this and we should be looking at reducing the level of overall crime, not encouraging it.