Originally posted by Rodie
I think that full-scale piracy against companies large and small is wrong. However, it would probably be better for the consumer if pirates only ripped off a large company like microsoft. The size of Microsoft cannot even be measured in any known metric.
Sure, the case could be made that the prices of software go up because of piracy, but Microsoft is going to charge a lot anyway, and there are some studies (I couldn't point to any, but I've read about a few in other piracy debates on this board) that show a lot of the people who pirate software wouldn't go out and buy the software if they couldn't pirate it. So in the end, the price markup might not be all that much from what it would be if there was absolutely no piracy.
This might be going into a different direction here, but what about software liscenses that say you can't install that piece of software on more than one computer? Personally, I don't really follow this rule. That's not to say I would go and install adobe photoshop on 40 computers in a lab or something.
An example of this is recently when my parents got my two sisters a worldbook enclyclopedia CD-ROM for mac. We have two macintoshes, one that is really old and one that fairly new. WorldBook wants you to buy another CD if you want to run it on more than one computer, but my parents really feel like spending another 50 bucks. It's kind of a silly rule though. It's like saying you have to have two different video tapes if you want to play it on more than one VCR.
I don't like to pay for simple programs (FTP, IRC, etc.), so for those I often just chose a freeware application that gets the job done. I'd feel really bad about ripping off some hard-working guy just so I could FTP and upload some files to my website.