So I’m sitting at home reading blogs when my neighbor, Rance, calls and asks me if I can get him a manual for some pirated software he’s thinking about buying.

“Surely you’re talking about some kind of computer game, right Rance? Something where Johnny Depp is hijacking ships all over the place and keeps running into those two dopey guards? I know you’re not asking about buying an illegally produced copy of a Microsoft product, because the last time I checked, that was slightly AGAINST THE LAW!”

“Right, right. I knew that,” said Rance, who is a programmer for another software company. “But I’m not going to resell the stuff. I just wanted to save a few bucks. A few hundred, in fact. Forget I even asked.”

As I hung up the phone, I thought it strange that Rance should call me, a card-carrying Microsoft employee, to aid and abet him in his crime. I guess he figured I had stacks of extra manuals in my office for just such an occasion. (”Which manual was that now? No problem, I’ve got dozens of those just sitting around collecting dust.”)

In fairness, though, Rance is a straight shooter. He didn’t try to snow me at all. In fact, he told me up front that the stuff was pirated. He probably saw one of those enticing spam mails that offers cheap software. You know the kind. They offer name-brand programs at a fraction of the retail price, only there’s no manual, no box, no tech support, and the ad looks like it was written by someone who took a crash course in English over the weekend.

“Cheep softwares you can buy for ver ry NOT expensive.”
“So TRUE!!! MicroSoft Word for low prrrices!!!”
…and my personal favorite…
“Want to finding softwares? He can get cheap ones hear!”

Of course, not too many people answer these ads. But that doesn’t matter much to the spammers because to them it’s just a numbers game. They send out so many millions of emails that even a miniscule response rate will bring in thousands of dollars of profit. And what’s a guy like Rance to do when faced with spending $500 for a legitimate copy of a program, or buying a bootleg copy for just $100? Sure, he’s supposed to ignore the offer, but an 80 percent savings is enough to tempt practically anyone.

Problem is you don’t really know what you’re getting yourself into when you buy pirated software. Even if you think you can do without the tech support and the book, you may get a setup CD with an invalid serial number which prevents you from installing the program. Happens all the time. The bootleggers already have your payment and you’re stuck with a $100 miniature frisbee, and all the time hoping that they don’t use your credit card number to go Christmas shopping.

Software piracy costs the industry about $12 billion every year, and big companies like Microsoft and Adobe are more and more aggressively tracking down the bootleggers. Because buying the stuff makes you party to an illegal act, there’s always the chance that you could get dragged into court for software piracy. Ouch. A friend in the legal department assures me that this is a serious deal. In describing the company’s efforts to hunt down software pirates, he uses words like “perpetrators,” “contraband,” and “in pursuit,” and suddenly I’m regretting not going to law school because his job sounds a whole lot more exciting than mine.

So the answer is no. Don’t buy the $10 Rolex from the guy on the sidewalk, don’t buy the Godfather trilogy for $15 from a friend of a friend, and don’t hand over good money for bad software.

A few days after he called, I saw Rance in the cul-de-sac and he was all smiles.

“Hey, Ken, I didn’t get that software. I talked my boss into buying a site license for our company, and once it comes in I’m going to load it onto my laptop. All on the up and up.”

“Nice job, silver tongue. You should be in sales.”

“Nah, too much competition. You know, with all the piracy.”

So I’ve heard.