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Comment by qppo | Hacker News Reader

It's how kids get into multimedia content creation using real tools without paying real money

It's how I did. Now I'm a professional frontend developer with adequate Adobe skills and a license paid for by the company that frequently come in handy on the job.

Me too. I distinctly remember the warez group editing the startup image of PS 6, which had the code name Venus in Furs. Apparently that was 20 years ago!

Anyhow, I know that much of my early software license transgressions resulted in actual software licenses.

license paid for by the company that frequently come in handy on the job.

...and now you know why Adobe products are so easy to pirate. Young pirates turn into loyal product users and customers.

More like they eventually join mid-size plus companies which Adobe tracks down to make them pay for their photoshop (if they detect it on a company network they will reach out). Or they simply just pay for it because they can and/or are professional/law abiding people.

Adobe doesn't spend copyright enforcement time on individuals much.

Didn't this also use to be the case with MS Windows and MS Office? I always thought they were so easy to crack, and Microsoft was so prone to turn a blind eye to pirate copies at home, because this led to employees familiar with their products at the office. And they did go after pirated software at the office.

It's almost as if pirating software for home users doesn't have the negative impact the big corporations would make you believe.

Microsoft gives everything for free to students, except office.

Check with your university. This shall includes hundreds of software, all editions of Windows both 32 bits and 64bits, as well as all editions of Visual Studio Ultimate, plus databases and other tools.

Yes, in later years, through my university this turned out to be the case. But it wasn't the case at first in my country.

They were easy to pirate up until CS6, nothing more than a keygen (or pregenerated key) and a couple blocks in /etc/hosts.

After that they really cracked down on piracy, and at the same time offer the CC subscription decently cheap (50$ a month) that honestly the risk of malware isn't worth it any more.

So one can pay $700 a year to Adobe or pay 1-2 month of student rent for that year. I'd say Adobe is pushing hard for piracy trying to get blood from a stone (students).

$50/month is the full price for the most complete bundle. Adobe has a student price at a lower rate that I can't be bothered to look up just as you couldn't be bother to look up before making your comment.

And even the 50$ - that's about the price of getting wasted once a month which most students can afford. The key difference between CS and CC is that you don't have to up-front hundreds/thousands of dollars.

This is a hidden downside of having proprietary defacto monopolies in tech. As long as the Adobe suite is the default in digital content creation, piracy is the default gateway to that profession. I don't care about Adobe's loss, as they pretty much encourage the status quo, I do however care about all the people risking their digital life's integrity for this. Since it's "this is how you do it", many non-tech people are not even aware of the potential fallout. It's the same for even more problematic scenarios, e.g. students using cracked Matlab, SPSS, ... executables to crunch real study data at home.

Yes, digital responsibility is ignored by those using cracked software, but really you can't ignore factual constraints and the economic situation, when talking about who's to blame.

The grandparents used alt.binary.* to get software

Ouch... a little too close to the truth here.

That’s still going strong actually and a really convenient way to download things.

It was really true back in the day, not so now. You can get e.g. Davinci Resolve for free and it as real of a tool as it gets.

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