These guys are being roasted, and rightly so. But let's also cut them some slack. Lord knows what kind of trouble I would have gotten into if the Internet had been around in its present form when I was in high school/college.

So there was no Internet or WWW when I was young. Instead, when I was 14 or 15, I was into the BBS scene. I found a file manager utility I liked that was shareware. Being dumb and young, I took a hex editor to the executable and modified the name/address of the author to my own, and re-uploaded the utility, hoping people would send money to me instead. Nothing good or bad came out of that, but I can imagine doing the equivalent these days would land me in hot water.