Consider the possibility that piracy is desirable to some commercial software houses. The expensive CAD packages for example. The cracks to evade the securities can be found really easily, and I can see that the links of such software on rapidshare are not at all being hunted down (in contrast with most of the games, OSes etc). A student or young professional who does not afford a 3000€ software will find easily the cracked version and will learn that software. On the other hand, large organizations, and well established professional engineers/architects are hunted down easily via each country's tax or legal system for software piracy. So the expensive software remains an industry standard (if you couldn't find pirated photoshop, believe me a whole lot of people would learn about the gimp - same analogy about AutoCAD and Intellicad) and the revenue comes from the companies that use it.