Did you buy your Photoshop or Lightroom or download it illegally?

Did you buy your Photoshop or Lightroom or download it illegally?

  • Option 1

    Votes: 109 72.7%

  • Option 2

    Votes: 107 71.3%
  • Total voters
    150
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Lightroom has been worth paying for at each release. Photoshop was worth paying for back in the day, but nothing's been added more recently that I need or want.
 
Chris101 said:
I'm wondering why a member with so little interaction with the rest of the forum (only 33 posts in almost 2 years) would make this a poll where the names of the respondents are recorded.

I voted before reading the thread, and now I'm sorry I did.
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A member of the 'Adobe Secret Police' maybe? 😛
 
I didn't buy mine. Got it off btjunkie (which was closed down months ago...)

Thanks too all the seeders who gladly shared their "paintbrush"or to be more precise, digital darkroom with me.
 
I don't even own a copy of the "real" Photoshop. I use Photoshop Elements (of which I have more than one bundled copies).
 
Actually the free trials are really worth checking out. If you have an older version of Lightroom, the Lightroom 4 trial will offer to make a copy of your database and convert it to the new format, while leaving the older version untouched. A month is plenty of time to try it out.

I'm pretty sure Adobe (whose business practices I disagree with more often than not) started this type of trial licensing precisely because of the widespread low-level unlicensed downloading of the try-before-you-buy kind.
 
Oh -- and for products other than Lightroom -- who would willingly subject themselves or their computers to the perverse incompetence of the "programmers" responsible for Adobe's application installers?

And is it pure incompetence, or incompetence mixed with ill will toward Adobe's customers? Other explanations are hard to square with the facts.

I sometimes need Acrobat for my work, and my contempt for Adobe (again, Lightroom development group excepted) has only grown with installation of each update.
 
nickw said:
It's not yours, you didn't pay for it. End of story.
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And it's not yours either. You don't pay to own a piece of software—ownership implies the right to resell. Purchasing a license for a program only grants you the privilege to use it.

Pirating software is like sneaking into Disneyland. Trespassing perhaps, but not theft.
 
I used a pirated version of CS3 for around 4 years, rationalizing it under the "Cannot afford it full version right now". After 4 years of 'sampling' the goods, I finally bought an academic copy of CS5. It was too cheap for me to feel comfortable using a pirated copy. I hear the student version doesn't allow any upgrade path though, so I guess I'll rebuy whichever CS is out just before I graduate.
 
punkromance said:
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If you're implying this was set up for more sinister reasons you're very wrong. I'm at art school and out of the hundreds of people I know personally, maybe two of them paid for any Adobe products. Adobe might care about people pirating their stuff enough to add preventative measures into the software, but if you think they're going to address such an absurdly large scale problem by making a poll on a largely film-based forum with the attention of luring maybe sixty unsuspecting people to say they stole it is frankly ludicrous.
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Keith said:
A member of the 'Adobe Secret Police' maybe? 😛
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No, of course I don't think that Adobe would be stalking RFF to catch thieves - they've got better and more sure methods. Based on thereplies there re very legitimate reasons for not paying for these products. But I've got to wonder at the motives for asking and then taking names.

Stupidity, bravery, or just ignorance? People do what people do. Why brag or admit on a (nearly anonymous) website - and give your name? I'm thinking masters thesis at best, and mere curiosity for the least innocuous case.

If I was new to a community, would I ask who was cheating just for kicks? Unlikely.
 
GoneSavage said:
And it's not yours either. You don't pay to own a piece of software—ownership implies the right to resell. Purchasing a license for a program only grants you the privilege to use it.
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Maybe in the US. In Europe, "license" schemes for off-the-shelf "shrink-wrapped" software are generally void - you purchase it, you own it, you can resell it. And past jurisdiction tends to treat equivalent downloaded software as it it were materially purchased.

GoneSavage said:
Pirating software is like sneaking into Disneyland. Trespassing perhaps, but not theft.
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In some cases, yes. In some others, it may be a legally appropriate refusal of abusive unilateral license terms, in yet others, it might be a legitimate act of resistance against monopolistic structures - past supposed acts of "piracy" (e.g. against Microsoft, Novell or Oracle) have indeed been later declared legitimate by courts and lawmakers, and the violated clauses declared void for violation of anti-trust and consumer protection laws.

On the other extremes there also are others where it will be plain theft or fraud.

And most of it will fall somewhere in between - which makes it impossible for me to feel much sympathy for the extremists from either side...
 
I wonder how many people use 'pirated' software because they see all the special discounts available to selected groups, such as students or employees of large companies. It seems to me to undermine the credibility of the vendor's pricing if he says: "you have to pay $500 for the right to use this but that chap over there only has to pay $50 because he's in such and such demographic."

I know, of course, all the marketing excuses around selective pricing but I can't imagine that most people understand or accept them.
 
I do think Adobe does somewhat benefit from kids downloading their products illegally. It somewhat secures their market dominance as kids are learning photoshop instead of a cheaper competing program. Once these kids get older and enter the professional world they might not want to take the risk of doing something illegal so they buy the product (or they work for an employer that buys the license for them).

If Adobe found a way to block all illegal uses of photoshop tomorrow, I don't think they would do it. It would be bad for business because all these users would switch to a cheaper of free alternative like GIMP etc. and they would possibly be lost as customers forever.

Also, if you look at the NYT's recently established paywall, it's quite obvious that they made it intentionally easy to circumvent. They are surely aware that anyone can reset the 30 free articles/month counter by simply deleting the cookies from the browser which is perfectly legal . The reason for putting up such a lax paywall is obviously to generate revenue from people who actually want to pay while still retaining a high readership overall to make money with ads.

I recently also heard that an increasingly large part of the budgets for blockbuster movies is getting financed through product placement deals. And of course the companies that have their products or brands in the movie don't really care whether or not the audience has paid for seeing the movie. They just want as many people as possible seeing it.

I think the way we have to look at piracy should not always be focused on the money. It's not always necessarily the case that companies are losing money through piracy. We should be more concerned with how it might reshape an industry in ways that are not exactly desirable.
 
Own CS3 I purchased Photoshop 7 in 2003 and upgraded it until the release of Lightroom. LR4 has become my main processing tool. Photoshop has been used less and less as LR seems to cover 95% of my needs.
 
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