As impressionable children, we all heard the little gem ‘Crime does not pay’. I think we can all agree that this is a rule to live by, generally. Was listening to the Buzz Out Loud podcast on the drive in. Rafe Needleman, editor for CNET’s Webware.com, commented that the well respected iPhone app company Tapulous got their earily start creating applications for jailbroken iphones. Since jailbreaking your phone is not illegal in the US, the market for applications that ran on these ‘modified’ phones may not have been a black market, but it was definately gray. Tapulous’ experience in that early market positioned them perfectly for when Apple created the iPhone App Store for application purchases, which has become a viable business model for the company.
No moral to this post, just an interesting observation on the ebb and flow of deliniage between whats unethical and whats just good business.