Piracy!

Today I've encountered this issue again, perhaps it's very hard to ignore it as it is very rampant in the Philippines and in the world. Within one of the 3 Macintosh User's group forums, a member is contemplating of switching to the Mac OS from Windows, and one of the factors (actually 4th on his list) is the availability of pirated softwares for the Mac. He was very openly vocal to it that it earned him the ire of some senior members, most of them I know personally, and are "advocates" of legit softwares. My take on this is, I am not against those people who patronize pirated softwares, nor am I against the crackdown by the authorities thru the lobbying of the developers against those who sell and use these applications. But practicality-wise, for the consumer, since it's a cheaper alternative, then why not. What do I mean, for example, a legitimate Microsoft Office Suite, will cost around P15,000.00 while one can buy it for only P50.00 in the sidewalks (if you know where to look). See the difference? Another one, Video Compact Discs (VCDs), before an original VCD would cost around P500.00, but with the proliferation of pirated copies in the street the original discs now cost around P200.00, now that's a huge slash in the price don't you think? Now, it makes one wonder, how come, they could bring down the price to that level and yet before it was extremely expensive. Perhaps, the "pirates" now are becoming an open consideration when it comes to the affected industries. And what I'm talking about here are just those which one can buy, but with the increasing number in broadband users, the threat now has become more widened because accessibilty to cracked software in the internet has become as simple as looking at the sky.