CheeseburgerBlue's Journal: Adobe Flips Pirates the Bird

I am a pirate-on-the-mend (save me, Jeebus!).

As a design professional, I have a broad array of software tools at my disposal. The vast majority of those tools are legitimately registered to me, and a few of them are not. Of those that are registered to me, I use more than half in a way that, strictly speaking, violates the terms and conditions of the end-user licence (by installing an extra copy of QuickTime Pro on my girlfriend's laptop, for example, for no other reason than to stop that annoying "Why not upgrade to QuickTime Pro?" pop-up screen-spam).

As I mentioned, I do have some pirated software. Usually, this is for evaluation purposes; I do end up paying for things that I use regularly and that contribute to my revenue. Occasionally, it is because some specific application from the corporate computer monoculture is required sporadically (like Word, or Excel), but not often enough to justify paying the punishing fees the applications' authors repeatedly charge for ongoing use of the most current version of their suite (though I am making a concerted effort to replace these with Open Source alternatives).

In the culture of my workstyle and that of my colleagues (animators/designers working mostly with Macintoshes), it is an accepted practise to use pirated software. It is not confined to kids wet behind the ears, or people living on the edge of fiscal solvency; it is the norm. Many designers do not even have legitimately registered copies of their key productivity applications. Here are some of the most common rationales:

* "Q-Corporation is evil, therefore I am doing a moral work by sticking it do them."
* "Market dominance forces me to use F-Product, not choice. Therefore, I refuse to pay."
* "My registration fee is a pittance compared to the annual revenue of R-Corporation."
* "I'm just trying it out. I'll pay for it eventually."
* "I couldn't afford to be in business if I didn't use pirated warez. Who can keep up?"
* "How are they going to catch me?"

Most of these justifications are really just shiny veneers to cover the last one, "How are they going to catch me?" The first point is moot, because people who say this also glibly hand over money to ten other corporations known to be at least as evil; the second point has some validity, but only if you are actively seeking other solutions; the third point is retarded; the fourth point has some validity only if the person saying this actually follows through, which, in my experience, most people who say this do not; the fifth point is retarded; the sixth point is mind-blowingly naive.

Software piracy is an arms race. On June 1st of this year, Adobe Systems upped the ante. All over the world, thousands or millions of pirate copies of Photoshop 6.1 and Photoshop 7 refused to launch as of 12:01 AM. The exact technical explanations for how Adobe has accomplished this are varied and conflicting (for one example see http://pnut.studiowhiz.com ).

What gets me is the amount of people I know who are whining. Cry me a river! All of their other rationales fly out the window when they are faced with an answer to the question "How are they going to catch me?". Some of the weepy Macheads I've talked to sound as if they honestly feel like Adobe has somehow ripped them off! Wake-up and smell the end-user agreement, idiots. (These are the same bozos who start to throw tantrums when they hear that flat-rate broadband pricing is coming to an end in their neighbourhood -- the injustice of actually having to pay for what you use! Unthinkable!) Yes, I had a pirate copy of Photoshop 7 on one of my computers -- I'm paying for a wedding and a honeymoon in the next few weeks, so I figured I wouldn't have the money to legitimately upgrade until autumn -- but I sure am glad I still have my legal copy of PS6 to reinstall (unlike some of my friends). I was annoyed to have to launch Classic MacOS to run Photoshop, but I wasn't deluded into thinking anything other than that I had brought this frustration upon myself.

As much as I do not favour the software developers' resorting to Draconian measures, I think they may have to. The culture of justifying piracy is totally out of control (at least in the professional Mac world). Anyone who thinks they're not going to do something drastic about it is a fucking moron. Anyone who thinks that it can be argued on a basis of "fairness" is a teenage cretin-philosopher, with all the real-life experience of a cartoon.
I am laughing at my panicking peers. I TOLD YOU SO! They will cry again when their copies of Microsoft Office fail and they find they cannnot read .DOC files, and I'll giggle as I sit at my Linux machine and have no trouble at all (once I get the office suite successfully *installed*, that is...er). I tap-dance in the tear-mud at the feet of those blithering gibbons who thought things would never change!

Less foolish people know that we are living in the freest times we will ever know. It is all downhill from here.