At least five employees of Apple have been removed from their jobs after they were found guilty of downloading the Mac OS Leopard illegally over the internet. Apparently, these employees were able to acquire copies of the Operating system which were distributed to developers at the Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference two weeks ago. It is rumored that dozens more are to face the same charges and are also bound to be terminated from the company. It is currently still unclear as to whether they have shared copies of the unreleased OS or if they separately acquired the software.

Though some people may think that Apple may be getting a bit too heavy-handed, the measures which they have taken could be understandable, considering all of the effort that they have taken in order to keep the Leopard under wraps until its official release in Spring of 2007. On top of that, Apple has also had to deal with a deluge of fake Leopard screenshots which circulated throughout the internet several months ago.

The company is infamous for having tracked down three people whom they claim have originally uploaded copies of the developer's version of the Mac OS Tiger back in 2004.

Apple's aggressive tactics may seem to be taking effect however, since popular torrent sites have already started to systematically delete torrents that are somehow related to the OS in question.