Why are people such cheap bastards? This guy clearly found Idea Champion’s product worth the effort of stealing it from their web site and making a Palm version of it, but not enough to actually compensate the company for producing it.
I’m so freaking tired of people just thinking that they can take whatever they want online without paying for it. Something tells me that they weren’t wantonly shoplifting before the Internet made it easy and discrete. They would have been too ashamed to actually steal something from a store but something about theft from the comfort of your own home removes the moral stigma.
He doesn’t even have the courtesy to link directly to the victims. He states that there’s a reason, though he never explicitly states it. I’m guessing that he didn’t do it because that would have tipped them off to his activity, which makes it all the more smarmy. Don’t worry, I sent the company an email apprising them of the trick.
[UPDATE (5/26/05): The “cheap bastards” moniker is an expression of my frustration with the widespread disdain for copyright I see among the people I encounter. I don’t know if Ricky Spears is really one or not, so I moved the link to his entry off of those words. I won’t change the wording because I really believe that most people who take what they haven’t earned are cheap bastards; I’ll leave it to the reader to decide if Spears’ action rises to that level.]
[UPDATE 2 (5/26/05): I just got an email from Mitch Ditkoff from Idea Champions. He agreed completely with my view of the situation and definitely was displeased at having his property stolen (or copyright infringed for the nigglers out there). His webmaster has closed the loophole.]