According to the Register-Mail Online, the previous owner of The Computer Shop on Galesburg's East Main Street had been practicing piracy. Arrrr.
The store is one of four in the state being sued, the other three being up in or near the Big City of Chicago. I wonder how the Galesburg guys allegedly got caught? Maybe they were selling "Microsawft Awffice IcksPee Perfesshunal software". Or, maybe they just ticked off the big guys.
I shouldn't mock the small-ish downstate community businesses. It is my fervent hope to one day own one of them. (When I win the lottery.) The smaller communities still have nearly precisely the same things to offer, these days, as do the larger communities. We have access to information and supplies, should we opt for them. We also have a few things that the cities don't: easy access to land, elbow-room, and local politicians. We're not ninnies or dim-bulb rednecks (although there are still a few around). The bulk of rural communities are filled, today, with ethnic and educational diversity comparable to any major metropolitan area. What we lack isn't art, but the massive tax base to fund public art. What we lack isn't education, it's jobs which require the ability to think independently (by virtue of a lack of jobs in any sense).
There are, primarily, differences only in scale between city and town, and between a little store in Galesburg, IL and a mega-corporation in Redmond, WA.
Microsoft got its big start via a lack of ethics.
So if this little store is genuinely involved in piracy and counterfeiting, it will prove that we have something else the big cities have in great abundance: crooks. That's not exactly a selling point, I know, but it does go to remind the urbanites that they're not so far removed from the soil. The only real difference between city and town is that the city usually has a back-up parachute in case of economic trouble.
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