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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

I draw the line for piracy OK or not OK on the simple question: are you making money with it?

If you're using e.g. Photoshop for your job, Adobe expects you to pay for the product... and if you're using it for private stuff, Adobe IMHO even wants you to pirate it (up to CS4.5 you only needed a keygen and a line in /etc/hosts, now you also have to patch a DLL file) in order to create a massive vendor lock in.

Microsoft followed the same strategy in China and elsewhere: create a massive lock-in, even if it means allowing piracy outright or just fighting it "pro forma", and when the people have enough money/education to use your product for business, they'll end up buying it because they're so used to it.

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I understand making something free so as to make it a legacy platform, but do you really think that Adobe isn't already the industry standard?

I am also curious why you think adobe wants you to pirate their software? They seems to be the leader in the market in terms of design software and such. You pirating their software gives them one less sale - bottom line. They are a company who needs to make a profit at the end of the day.

Adobe's profits originate from the vast amount of companies and one-man startup/design shops using their products. Get the kids fixed on Photoshop while they're in school and the chance is high that they'll be using (and paying for) Adobe products throughout their career.

And for the "want" part: for a company like Adobe, it'd be easy and cheap to implement much more effective anti-piracy measures (e.g. hardware dongles like Steinberg's eDongle for Cubase). So I think they either don't care about piracy at all (because the profits are still huge) or they encourage piracy (see above for the reason) while still doing "something" to please shareholders.

I wonder how much of their consumer business does come from students/consumers, however. Autodesk is a little more niche but they give away their software to basically anyone who's not a professional (You can get almost all of their products for free if you are a student or even unemployed, IIRC). Adobe's student discounts are extremely weak by comparison, which may suggest a significant segment of their (paying) userbase is nonprofessional.

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