I fully support legal software. If everybody would buy all their software, the prices would be much lower, since software companies would be able to afford to give them cheaper. Also, we need to support smaller companies to encourage them to develop their apps. But, I know that reality doesn’t reflect my wish, especially in the developing world.

Apparently according to one of our forum member, some print-labs are teaming up with the big companies, like Adobe and Macromedia, to stop people from stealing software… they do this by running some sort of check on the file you send them (if it is an original file from one of these programs) where they can check your serial number and stuff. This is then sent to headquarters and if it comes up to be a number on their ‘black list’ they slap you a fine!

This is no joke. I know of at least one freelance designer here in Iceland who got in trouble with this. The way around this, if you can’t afford your software just yet, is to PDF everything… there is no way for them to check that!

Did you hear about such practices? Is that legal?

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