Of all the albums I bought before I "knew what I was doing," many turned out to be bootlegs.  Looking at other threads on StC, it seems like that's not unusual.

If you ever bought bootlegs by accident, what did you end up doing with them?  In my case, I was torn between selling them (with full disclosure, or course) and just throwing them in the trash.  In the end, I threw them away.

I never bought any, that's what I did with them.

Good point.  I changed my question to address only those of us who actually bought some

I still have them. I plan on keeping them. They've earned their spot over the years.

To me, bootlegs were only bad if you unknowingly bought them and considered them to be the real thing. For me, they were a less expensive option for obtaining the music that, quite frankly, I'm thankful was available (remember, high speed internet was not always a given and the availability of Japanese CD's was not so great in the late 90's and a good portion of the 2000's). I made many great discoveries through them that I wouldn't have otherwise made via random $30 soundtracks, including the King of Fighter series and the Legend of Heroes series (two staples in my VGM collection for a long time), as well as Seiken Densetsu 3, the Sailor Moon SNES soundtrack/arrange and also, a good number of Japanese vocals collections (Sailor Moon, DBZ, Nuku Nuku, etc) There's a couple I'm looking to replace, but my money is better spent on ones I don't currently have, so it's not really a priority.

On the same hand, I cringe at the idea of someone possibly showing up to meet Uematsu/Mitsuda/Kikuta/insert-composer-here and asking them to autograph a Son May edition of their work. That would be quite the epic fail.

In the US, I bet that's happened more times than we want to imagine.

Equally fail-tastic is when someone hands a composer a soundtrack they did absolutely zero work on for signature action. I once saw someone hand the FFX-2 soundtrack to Uematsu to sign, which he did, but he kinda looked back at his manager (Ogawa-san from Dog Ear) like *shrug?*

To respond to OP -- I sold most of my bootlegs after I discovered what they were, but I did so with bold advertisement that "hey, this is SonMay / EverAnime Taiwanese bootleg material here" with low suggested prices.

This would've happened between 99 and 02. Mostly stuff I'd purchased on eBay or a long-dead, very-terrible site called GameCave.

I have a couple bootlegs, but I ended up buying the originals later. Most of my CD listening is with CD-Rs to save wear and tear on the originals. If I have a SonMay or EverAnime album, I just listen to that instead of making a CD-R.

Most of my bootlegs were either thrown away or given away for free, though I still have two. Soul Calibur and Hyrule Symphony; they were the last ones I replaced and so they're just sitting in a drawer now.

Threw them out with a fury a long time ago. Mistakenly bought before I really knew about official ones in my ignorant years as a VGM collector.

I can attest the bootlegs were often poorer quality but apart that I don't even want people to have them nor do I even want them in circulation.