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Published on Friday, July 04, 2008
By Steven Rosenberg
We've been stealing software ever since companies began charging for it.
Not that there's anything right with that. Just because someone decides to demand $50 - or $500 - for something we want or need doesn't mean we can just take it.
Except ... that it kind of does. Making things easy to steal makes them more likely to be stolen.
The music industry learned that. The lengthy boom they enjoyed by digitizing their entire catalogs for CDs in the '80s only meant that people would swap those digital bits incessantly once technology (broadband Internet, writable CDs) allowed them to do so.
Computer software used to be what companies bundled in the box so they could sell their hardware.
Apple still pretty much works this way. The company's software - OS X, iTunes - is brilliant, but it's only there to get you to buy Macs, iPods and ... digital music
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