This is really a question of the style of the times.
Take what David is saying, back in the 80's he used Pirate software as a necessity. But this wasn't available to the masses via the internet? Back then it was, I imagine, probably printing companies, prepress and design agencies. Which was fine (in comparison to how it's used in todays times), the software was being pirated by people that used it everyday to make high-end publications and designs, it was in a company setting, reputable etc. It was pretty much localised in terms of who was pirating it wasn't any Joe Soap. And without a high speed internet connection you couldn't pirate these things, and it was mostly businesses that had this available to them, not home users.
Even when the internet did come around download speeds were so pathetically slow that probably only companies using expensive ISDN or satellite powered internet service providers (which would be pretty expensive), so it was still large firms involved in piracy, in my opinion.
There was still a huge amount of skill involved in making these files press-ready and it wasn't a matter of “make a PDF and send it to a printers” or “print it to the A3 digital printer and trim”. There was still a lot of work had to be done.
Printing companies probably up to about (in my mind) 2003 probably only every operated filmsetters, some even still shooting to camera and some started introducing CTP. I don't remember PDF workflow being implemented before 2004… at least not in the prepress where I worked. I had only finished college then and we were outputting to filmsetters in college, there was no CTP device.
But nowadays everyone has a super fast connection. You can virtually get anything you want, anything that was every produced digitally is available to download on the internet. And what's worse is that ANY Joe Soap can pretty much download and start using the software without having to know the trade at all.
The digital era has kicked in, you can setup a printing company for a fraction of the price it would have cost up to the early 2000's. Software can be pirated. Cheap digital printers can be bought at ground prices from companies in liquidation, so can trimming and finishing equipment.
Thinking back to the 80's, 90's even early 2000's you still had to have a fierce knowledge of the printing process. You didn't even really have forums or blogs or things, they are all new since about 2005 (in my eyes).
Piracy today with software is a lot different to back in the 80's, 90's and even early 2000's. Where it was legitimate companies with big printing presses, high-speed internets and the such that could genuinely do the work.
My point is now it's so cheap to setup that anyone can pass themselves off as a designer, prepress department, print company and they are complete and utter cowboys. There's no other way to describe them. They did a flyer in Word for someone and they liked it. They research the design software – download a pirate company and off they go flaunting their business. I'm not saying everyone who pirates software is like this.
The introduction of the these design contest sites riles me up. The opportunity to design logos and templates etc. and the off chance that you win you get paid? Now you have any wannabe designer downloading the software, designing logos and such like things for design contests and getting paid. Now I mean the end results for the contests is shockingly bad. They use clipart, copyrighted images, remove watermarks from stock images, live trace other logos that they find through google etc. Flaunting all the copyright laws that you can think of.
But this sort of thing did not happen in the 80's, 90's, early 20's. Simply because it was legitimate people running legitimate businesses that had the means through the fast internet speeds available to companies (home users would only get 56k modem speeds etc).
So the knock-on effects of piracy in todays world is completely different to when it was in the 80's, 90's and early 20's.
hmmm… I have to head off now so I can't polish this train of thought right now or even finish it – but I hope it's not offending to anyone?
