For all of you that answered "Yes", please don't pirate software. When you create anything, no one has a proper right to it except on your terms. Without you, t

For all of you that answered "Yes", please don't pirate software. When you create anything, no one has a proper right to it except on your terms. Without you, that thing you've created would not exist. You should be concerned about proper rights because your life, along with everyone else's, depends on individual rights (this has always been true, but it should be quite obvious to us because our technologically advanced civilization - through which literally billions of us are supported artificially - is the product of man's mind, left free to act). No one could live without the right to their person and property. Without those rights, they would not have space to exist in, a body, food to eat, etc. In this way, respect for someone's intellectual property is just as important as respect for their physical property. As more people fail to respect the creator's terms, they will increasingly have less motivation^ (and resources, if that's the gating factor) with which to pursue and share ideas. A result of this is that pirates hurt themselves long-term: they are depriving themselves of future material and intellectual advances that their honest patronage would make possible. For example, a single $100 payment for a company that has millions of customers has an exceedingly small impact, but that is not the same thing as $0, and all those payments together result in wonderful products (or not, in which case the company stops getting so much money). A well-managed company with a bigger product development budget can pursue more ideas and build better products than they could with a smaller one. The consequences of piracy for the pirate are arguably more severe than for the company getting ripped off. For example, take the case of a aspiring person trying to improve their vector illustration skills with the eventual goal of becoming a paid designer. Stealing a copy of Illustrator won't give them the same result as someone who pays for it. Someone who saved hundreds of dollars working at a low-paying job will be more motivated to put their investment to productive use than a pirate that just rips it off a torrent site, all else being equal. The trader who traded value for value (money for software) will do better work, and more of it. A pirate will be more likely to employ the same "creative method" that they used to get their ill-gotten software: "I'll just download the ideas, too. Why not?" Instead of just second-handedly copying designs from others, our honest artist will be more likely to actually learn their tool more fully and look to novel sources for inspiration: "I worked an entire summer to get Illustrator. I'm going to skip going to that party, fun as it may be in the short-term, because it means more to me to make that summer of hard work amount to something more than a shiny package on my shelf." Furthermore, by behaving ethically, they'll be able to more easily advocate for the kind of society that rewards people for using their minds, which is precisely what they need to survive as designers. (Our fledgling designer could not exist as a designer in a world where all people pirated their work; they would have to devote more of their time to supporting themselves some other way.) To express this as a general principle: anything that you take by force of theft or fraud is against your long-term self-interest. It's like cheating on an exam - you might get a better grade short-term, but in the long-term, you are more likely to end up with a job you are unqualified for, with all of the ramifications that entails (performing badly [the cheater has not acquired the same depth of knowledge that an honest student has], getting fired, decreased self-esteem [as the cheater is left in doubt about whether they could have passed without cheating], decreased income, etc.) ^Motivation doesn't have to be financial. People who violate the terms of an open source license can drain the motivation out of a programmer that might otherwise be perfectly happy, stalling or even halting future work. Open source license violators violate exactly the same principle that software pirates do: that the creator of a work has a right to dictate the terms of its use.