Bin those bootlegs!

Kaiwai has "gone legit." He's thrown out $20,000 of bootleg software he was running, and his iPod has been reduced from 5GB of bootleg music to 500MB of purchased music ... and he's very happy about it.

I know it sounds cheesy, but I know that the music and software I am running, I actually paid for; I feel like I'm doing the moral thing by purchasing the music and software rather than downloading it, I don't have to constantly back up my music collection, I already have masters, I'm not worried as to the reliability of the software, as I have the software direction from the company rather than praying that the provider hasn't hacked and added in a virus or Trojan to one of the cd images.

Ultimately, I think it also comes to do good old fashioned decency; if you were a software company or a music artist, how would you feel if your livelihood was cut short because people decided that you were 'too rich' and thus, justified the bootlegging of IP along those lines? Sure, Adobe and Microsoft have massive boat loads of money, but what about the small companies who provide software, such as Panic Software, who aren't multi-billion, let alone multi-million dollar companies.

There are a number of companies out there, like Panic, who provide top notch software at a reasonable price to the public, and yet are done over by those who wish to destroy the very providers of the software they use; complaining on one hand that there aren't enough software titles out there, and on the other hand [they're] pirating rather than purchasing, thus making software development unsustainable.

For me, the choice was simple, get legit, get on the right side of the law, and live happily ever after . . .

Good for him. As he says, "Ultimately I think as people we need to realise is that yes, intellectual property does matter." Yes. It does.

LINK: I'm going legit! - Kaiwai's Blog

TAGS: Property_Rights, Geek_Stuff