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Apple's New Leopard Hits Illegal Download Sites

by Tim Stevens on October 26, 2007 at 09:01 AM

Apple's Leopard Hits Illegal Download SitesAfter yesterday's (mostly) glowing reviews , it's no surprise that Mac fanatics want to get their hands on Leopard, the new Apple operating system (OS), as quickly as possible. It's also no surprise that anyone who wants a new OS this badly isn't necessarily inclined to pay for it. So, enter the Bit Torrents of the world, which are sites that enable peer-to-peer sharing of (not infrequently illegal) files. Wired's Threat Level blog found the torrent sites were humming last night with copies of Apple's latest Mac release.

Leopard hits Apple Stores today, but pre-release review copies went out weeks ago to the media and other places. Unlike its Microsoft Vista OS counterparts, Apple doesn't use any copy protection or lengthy serial numbers or anything to protect its pre-releases. It relies on trust, and, it's plain to see, perhaps this trust is unfounded, since thousands of copies of Leopard are being downloaded illegally even as you read this.

It's speculated that the majority of these downloaders are just looking to get their instant fix and will eventually go out and buy a legal copy of Leopard, but we wouldn't be surprised if, as the Mac OS becomes ever so slightly more mainstream, Apple doesn't start adopting Microsoft-like copy protection schemes.

From Threat Level

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Tags: Apple, filesharing, Leopard, Mac, OS X, OsX, p2p

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