Leo sat in the glow of his monitor at 2 AM, desperate to finish a wedding DVD for his sister. His trial of had just expired, and the export button was grayed out. Frustrated and unwilling to pay the fee for a one-time project, he typed the fateful string into a search engine: anymp4-dvd-creator-crack-full-version-download .

Leo ended up spending the rest of the night—and most of the next day—wiping his hard drive and changing every password he owned. He eventually bought the official license for the software, realizing that the price of the "free" version was far higher than the retail cost.

The wedding DVD was finished on time, but it served as a permanent reminder: in the world of software, if you aren't paying for the product, you—and your data—usually are the product.