As a student, you can buy academic versions. You can buy the $2100+ Adobe CS5 for like $199. Piracy is not an option imho.

piracy is cool only if it allows one to learn (trial versions?) but to make money from it - not cool.

setting standards (.doc etc) across the industry that everyone must follow by paying huge amounts of money - also not cool.

its not easy.

I understand many of your comments on piracy. But i assume most of you are guys who have a job. Are you sure you would have tought similarly when you were in college without a job?

You shouldn't ask ppl's opinion. There is always someone who is against piracy, no matter what. So, just do it quietly if there is absolutely no other option.

I kept a job while in university. You seem like you're looking for justification.

In that case, just do it, hope you don't get caught. If you do, then you can't say that people didn't persuade you otherwise. And if you get a job with one of these companies you're pirating from; hope you don't get downsized due to economical reasons that directly/indirectly are connected to piracy.

And what about this college. Doesn't it have a computer lab? Or library? And why would you pirate... wouldn't the openness of your OS of choice have viable options? I mean... it's so damn open.

Sorry, I'm anti-piracy to the core.

Judging by the poll answers, probably explains why there's such a hard dislike to DRM around these parts.

Piracy supporters are rationalizing. If there's an expectation of payment, whether it's for a solid product, service or what-have-you, then obtaining the item or service without paying is theft.

Some people conveniently overlook the fact that intangible goods represent a service.

I always worked in college. I also work very hard to maintain ethics and avoid succumbing to poor logic and rationalization. Don't always succeed, but I try.

I'm a college student, currently jobless. My opinion on piracy is that it's a morally neutral event - you're not right in doing it, and you should pursue better alternatives, but, in itself, it's not morally wrong.

Depending on the exact circumstances, this gets modified slightly - how much profit is the person/company making here, how much profit should they make off what you're pirating (to the best of one's judging ability)?

I have a game (Gratuitous Space Battles) that I've bought (inc. every DLC expansion pack) - made by an independent game developer. I always felt it was worth paying full price for it. I think pirating anything that has an as-good (or good enough for your purposes) open source alternative is morally worse than doing the same for something that has no such alternative, because you're also contributing to the spread of the proprietary standards with the former, while the latter is conceivably reasonably necessary.

Also, note that I hold software piracy and entertainment media piracy (or whatever you'd call movies, books, music, etc) as different things. They are very related and close, but different nonetheless. Again, whether or not I feel there should be payment for such things (and by extension how 'wrong' pirating that particular thing is - with the default, all else being equal position being that it's neutral morally) is linked to how much I believe a person/group/company deserves that profit, etc. I'm more likely to pay an artist directly, or 'donate'/gift them money, than to pay a company in the record industry, for instance.

(By a similar token, when I DO have a job I intend to donate decent chunks of money to open source projects on par with proprietary software.)

- Edit -

Texrat posted while I was typing, about how digital goods represent a service. I wanted to say that I agree with that with principle. And in practice, I would take that into account as part of "certain circumstances" and so on. To be honest almost every ethics opinion I have is, well, too in-depth to cover in a forum post.

To answer the OP's question in a more blunt and concise manner, though: Unless you can argue that the software is something so important to your (or others') quality of life being above a reasonable minimal standard, present or future, that it's morally wrong for the other party to not give away that software (I would claim that can be the case in the modern world, but it's relatively rare) for free, then you can't say that it's morally right for you to pirate it. Is it 'ok' in that it's not unethical - I would say there's a decent window for that, but depending on what software you want and how much you need it, and how much the makers of it are impacted by you not paying them, there's still a decent possibility that it does cross over into what I'd consider unethical.

Companies that sell software depend on users stealing it. Then they can guilt-trip consumers into buying it. It works. It's kind of like a primitive version of shareware.

Once upon a time, software was rigorously protected. It was also incredibly overpriced. The companies that tried to sell that software did badly. A company such as WordPerfect did well. Its software was not copy protected. The reason it did well was that customers stealing the software had a chance to try it out -- no one in their right mind was going to buy a bunch of software at very stiff prices just to see if it might fill their needs.

WordPerfect found other ways to encourage stealers to buy its product. Frequent updates and many disks gave incentive to buying a legit copy -- stealing was such a hassle!

The current software industry is based on consumers as they are, not on ethical robots who do the right thing. It knows that they will steal software -- the question is, how to slowly steer them into the right path? The answer is to pretend piracy is a horrible thing yet continue to make piracy possible. The companies that do this prosper.

What I am saying is a condensed version of what goes on, and is inevitably inaccurate in some ways. But it is the general picture of what goes on. So a student shouldn't go into ethical fits because his friends are stealing software. It's part of the system and how it works.

^ an utter crock

When I was in college my aunt sponsored my own machine. She left the software up to me - which meant a copy of pirated Windows XP.
After I got my first job, after I paid off all my student debts and paid off my aunt for the machine she sponsored, I went and bought a copy of Windows to match the one I had pirated for that machine.

For every pirated Windows virtual machine that I installed in college, I have bought a genuine Windows copy.
I paid for multiple VmWare Workstation installation to compensate for the times I installed it from a pirated copy.

I do this because I believe in the fact that I get what I give. I write open source software because thats another way I hope to pay back for all the free stuff I used.

Its Karma and you don't want her to take from you forcefully what you can pay of your own free will.