It very much depends on the market. Someone pirating a $40 table plan program is almost certainly pathological, granted. A lot of other software is totally unaf

It very much depends on the market. Someone pirating a $40 table plan program is almost certainly pathological, granted. A lot of other software is totally unaffordable for keen amateurs or people in developing countries. In my field (music technology), most software ranges from hundreds to thousands of dollars. A serious composer might have $30,000 worth of software licenses. Cut-down licenses are usually available, but they're often too barebones to be useful; paying for software that's worse than the pirated version is difficult to stomach if you're on a tight budget. I fully understand why a 19-year-old EDM producer might choose to torrent Ableton Suite and Komplete Ultimate, rather than trying to find $2,000 for full licenses or paying $300 for a tiny fraction of the full functionality. Even the cut-down licenses seem absurdly expensive if your price anchor for software is $0.99. It's a really difficult problem and I'm not sure what the solution is. I suspect that there's now a tragedy of the commons problem - piracy is so rampant that the costs are being priced into software, which just makes it less affordable. The minority who do pay for their software are subsidising the majority who don't. Heavy-duty DRM solutions like iLok[0] have barely made a dent on the problem and created a huge amount of annoyance for legitimate customers. The bigger players are deeply integrating their software with proprietary hardware[1][2][3], which seems to be a promising approach. [0]https://www.ilok.com/ https://www.ilok.com/ [1]https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/maschine/production-systems/maschine/ https://www.native-instruments.com/en/products/maschine/prod... [2]https://www.ableton.com/en/push/ https://www.ableton.com/en/push/ [3]http://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html http://www.uaudio.com/uad-accelerators.html