Okay, so I'm not going to pretend software piracy is okay. It's not. We are all aware of this.

On the other hand, I don't think stealing from consumers is okay either, especially when they paid you a considerable sum of money already for your product.

The backstory, in case you haven't caught it: AVID, formerly Digidesign, have been essentially caught out crippling their Pro Tools multitrack recording software. A crack has spread through the mysterious channels of BitTorrent that allows you to release the arbitrary restrictions placed on Pro Tools - namely, in the entry-level LE product, limiting the track count to just 48 and the voice count to 96. Tracks and voices are different things, which we won't get into here because they're complicated. Suffice to say they are different but related.

Here's the kicker, though - it's not just for LE. It also releases the restrictions placed on their high-end HD systems. We're talking people who have spent thousands and thousands of dollars here. AVID have always been insistent that the restriction was in place due to the hardware - the better the system you bought, the more hardware came with it, and the more tracks and voices you got. We are now finding out this is not the case.

In fact, the crack releases you from needing any AVID hardware at all.

What shits me most about this - other than the blatant lying from AVID - is people rushing to their defence. I read this from a British engineer: "Yes, it's an unlimited track count theoretically, but in reality you've got more chance of finding rocking horse shit." He wrote this in the same paragraph as stating that he just spent £13,000 on a new HD|3 system, the highest end system you can get.

Let's jump on to store.apple.com/uk.

For £13,000 you can get the highest end Mac Pro - with two 2.93GHz Quad-core Intel Xeon CPUs, that's eight cores total, and 64GB of RAM. I'm not sure if I said that hard enough. SIXTY-FOUR GIGABYTES OF RAM. That's not only the entire session in physical RAM, it's probably all the RAM Pro Tools could ever possibly use. If you can't run 192 voices natively on that machine, I will eat my hat. I will eat all of my hats, and the hats of all my friends.

Actually, I must confess: that's not true. For £13,000, you cannot get one of these incredible, outrageously powerful machines.

You can get two.