Reply To: Piracy good or bad

Apologies to David for my tangentential take on this, but: piracy in software cannot be justified, in any way!

1. Using pirated software, you can produce the same stuff cheaper than honest people do.

2. You steal from the software developers as sure as you were taking the money out of their wallet, because they expect to get paid for their work, calculated their prices upon that, then see everyone use their programs and not getting any money back from it.

3. If the developers don't get paid, they won't make updates or a new version. Why should they?

4. Oh but not everyone is dishonest? Well, the honest (paying) users get to pay for stolen copies as well, because if only 5 copies are paid out of 20 actually used copies, those 5 paid copies have to bring in the same amount of money.

5. You are not “stealing property”, only a copy thereof. My standard answer to that is: in that case give me your credit card number and expiry date. That in itself has no monetary value; it's just a string of digits. Oh and it's fully ensured, so even if I took advantage of it (imagine!), you still won't have lost a penny.