As a preface, I will say up front that the MPAA and RIAA are wrong in their litigation practices, as media such as video and music are legally fuzzy areas as per P2P (WRT recoding entertainment from the radio or TV vs. from the Internet.)

OTOH, software piracy is clearly illegal, dangerous to the downloader, and completely unnecessary.

The earliest claim of "beta testing" (yeah, right...) implies reporting bugs and submitting results. I sincerely doubt all the people out there sucking down copies of XP are doing any of that, including the thread-starter (in fact, I suspect that those with more than two working neurons in their heads don't, simply out of fear that MSFT might detect the cracked copy and act on it.)

IOW, that myth is busted.

"try before you buy" - err, isn't that why most companies publish free demos? Again, I'm willing to wager that 99% of the downloaders out there who go to the trouble of finding cracks and keygens never bother to purchase the thing they'd cracked, unless they desperately need tech support or a patch of some sort or another for the thing.

"I am sorry I will not pay 150 bucks for an operating system."

I don't - http://www.linux.org , http://www.freebsd.org , etc... (shrug).

Besides, only a flaming idiot would download and use an OS (of all things) from an untrusted source (esp. since they're usually stuffed to the gills with trojans.)

Once, a few years back, you might have been able to pass around binaries with some reasonable expectation that the item would be legit and free from embedded malware. Not anymore.

As for companies charging too much cash for software? There are alternatives out there, with very, very few exceptions.

Don't like the alternatives? Then spend some of those l33t cracking skills helping to improve the software (the source code is right there, after all)... or are you one of those people who have no coding skill, and rely on others to do it for you (in which case you deserve whatever fate that "l33tcr4k.exe" file hands you.)

"I would really like to know how many in this thread can afford Studio MX or any Ulead stuff, or some 3d Studio Max or some good rips of AV that REALLY work"

Eh? ...how many of you even know how to USE 3DS Max? I know artists who make gobs of cash using 3DS Max (or Maya, or more commonly, Lightwave) for a living, but they spent years learning how to actually use the thing, and not just have it parked on their hard drives for bragging points ("yeah d00d, I gots da 3DS Max hookup - check it...") Look around, and you can find free or cheap Win32-based alternatives that do most of what 3DS Max does, sometimes better than 3DS Max is able to muster (especially in the rendering department.)

To sum it all up, instead of making excuses like a little boy with his hand stuck in the cookie jar, why not do something constructive about it, like building open-sourced versions of programs that beat the crap out of the commercial version?

/P

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