When I first got my Powerbook, a friend of mine hooked me up with Photoshop, Office, and a few other applications. At the time money was tight since Kyla was less than a year old and we were adjusting to living off of only my income; plus I had just dropped $2500 on a computer.
Since then I've taken higher paying jobs, so I've ignored the whispers of The Pirate Bay and ponied up my credit card to get new software. I've long wanted to get a legit copy of Photoshop, but I wasn't going to shell out $700 for CS2 or CS3, and Elements has until this most recent version been PowerPC only.
Software piracy is kind of a funny crime. Software companies will publicly state that it is the same as stealing, but I don't really buy that. If you're pirating software that you wouldn't otherwise purchase, the software maker isn't really losing anything. But if the application is actually worth the price to you, then piracy is harmful.
In may ways there are positive side-effects of software piracy on the developers. I started off pirating several applications that I later purchased, so clearly that was beneficial. Many people will pirate expensive programs at home, then get their employers to pay for copies for them to use at work. How many copies of Photoshop has Adobe sold to people whose first experience with it was a copy that they got from a friend or downloaded off of a P2P network?
As long as what your doing eventually puts money into the proper hands, I think your conscience should rest easy. Otherwise you're a free rider who's making the software cost more for the rest of us.
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