How does this relate to the issue that antivirus companies do horrible things and hold ignorant paying users who don't even know how to pirate software, and legitimate software producers hostage like some sort of technical mafia?
Because they only became a business due to the people that were pirating software in the 80's.
Thanks to the increase of virus across MS-DOS, Atari, Acorn, Amiga and Mac operating systems, specially on boot sector floppies, the general public learned that anti-virus were required software to always have installed.
Yes, it was the spread of pirated software, which crackers usually filled with virus "just for fun", alongside the lack of protection mechanism in the desktop OSes that gave rise to virus.
Thus making anti-virus a software package, that most home users would buy, in my home country even that was usually pirated.
