Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
Take Photoshop for example. I know there are a lot of people out there who have downloaded, installed, and use Photoshop. But, these people would not be using Photoshop had they had to purchase it. So as far as profits for Adobe go, these people cost nothing to Adobe. But, the issue here is if these people did not get a free copy of Photoshop, what would they be using instead? Would they have purchased a lower cost alternative? So while Abode lost nothing, some other companies did lose something. They did not have their program stolen, but they did have their sales stolen. So while you can argue that the person would never have bought the program anyway, it means they don't need to buy one in that category of software now so someone loses the a sale.
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People will use Gimp if they are not using Photoshop so there are no lost sale. I also think that people having used a pirated copy of Photoshop increase the sale of Photoshop since when it is decision time at the company people want to have Photoshop.
Personally I think that illegally downloading photoshop is bad because it hurts open source alternatives like Gimp. That holds for a lot of other things like Office and Windows operating systems. With less piracy the market for these programs will be smaller and we will faster get better open source alternatives.