delirial

Well, it’s no surprise. Sooner or later, every application gets cracked and released. The “bad” thing about this one is that, while legit customers are still waiting to buy their paid versions of Adobe Photoshop CS3 (the newest installment of the popular image manipulation software), software pirates are already able to download it for free.

In a matter of 4 hours, over 700 users have already downloaded the software from a single site.

While I don’t necessarily endorse piracy, I do like the message that Pirate Groups implicitly send to software development companies: “Activation schemes are not effective.” Millions of dollars get spent by companies trying to make their software more secure against software pirates. Yet, all they manage to achieve is make their paying customers uncomfortable, and software pirates spend 30 more seconds while they generate a pirated activation key.

How can companies stay ahead of software pirates when it’s easier/faster to download the pirated version than to be a legit owner? Microsoft tried their WGA program, which has proven to be completely ineffective against piracy, and the holy grail of consumers’ dissatisfaction.