Err...what's going on here then...

http://search.ebay.co.uk/Photoshop-CS2_W0QQfromZR40QQsojsZ1

Loads of people selling full versions of Photoshop CS9 (v9) for Windows on CDR, no box, no manuals. Does come with a serial number and activation key.

I notice that quite a few zero feedback bogus bidders with names like " illegal_software_seller_under_investigation" and "i_love_reporting_these_pirates_to_adobe_and_getting_cash" have made bids. AFAICT all they're doing is driving the price up so the alleged pirate seller gets more money . I really don't know what these do-gooders hope to achieve.

So, is this pirate software for sale on eBay? I really can't see how it can be anything else since the retail version of PS CS2 sells for £450+ and these auctions are closing at around £20-30. If it is pirate software then I don't understand how they can get away with selling it so blatantly

Most of the sellers have very high feedback scores and ratings so they've been around for a while. I'll soon find out what's going on because I bought one that had a BIN on it

Michael.

 

Bin?

 

Buy It Now

 

Yep I am forever getting emails saying OEM software at 75% off, companies like Adobe have very tight control over their software prices, I can almost guarentee they are pirated.

Local computer markets are rife with pirated software and its much cheaper than what they ask on ebay.

All my software is legal though, I have photoshop Elements 3.0, the only feature I really miss is layer masking but I didn't use that much either, it has full support for layer effects etc.

 

oops!

 

Ermmmm...

 

Sounds suspect. Interestingly, in Jon Honeyball's Epilog column in PC Pro last month, he had a rant about how Adobe prices are the same figurewise - i.e. £200 in Europe as they are in the US - i.e. US$200. Adobe do need to consider the prices they are charging - lowering them could well have a positive effect on reducing piracy. Mind you, other companies are just as bad - Autodesk's prices have gone up considerably of late - AutoCAD LT used to be about £400. Last time I checked, it was now about £750!

 

and they wonder why piracy happens with price differentials like that.
when they stop thieving from the public, maybe the public will stop thieving from them

 

The problem is programs like Photoshop are aimed at businesses, most of them can afford £500, if you cannot afford the full version get the Elements version, it still has 90% of the features and costs £50. Now surely most people would not have a problem paying this?

I certainly don't and I have no money at all, but I believe developers should be paid for their hard work.

Being a programmer myself I know how hard it is to develop an application like Photoshop and it dosn't grow on trees.

One of my machines does have a pirated version of XP Pro, but that was to do an assignment on in Visual Studio ASP.NET, and me and my family already owned 3 legal XP Home licences so I didn;t see why I should have to pay £100 for XP Pro when there is no reason IIS can't run on XP Home apart from marketing reasons.

 

Déjà vu. We've had this argument.

 

The software is aimed at profesional repro companies and such like, with the clients they work for the outlay for PS is nothing to them.
Your argument holds no water.

 

The company I work for charge £4000 for a static website, now you imagine 10 contracts like that a year plus the normal consultancy work £500 for Photoshop is nothing.

I am quite proud that every single piece of software installed on my machine is legal, I don't use Microsoft Office for example, I use Sun's Open Office instead.

 

OpenOffice is becoming a credible alternative to Microsoft Office and includes native PDF exporting, saving you the hassle/cost of buying the full Acrobat Suite (at least £20, I think). The latest 1.9 series of betas also include the new Base module, which while not as good as Access, makes a decent stab at an alternative (and free) database package that is platform-independant.

Having tried Xandros Linux last weekend, I can do 90% of what I need to do on a day-to-day basis (including imaging, as The Gimp is a decent enough image editor that can give Photoshop a run for it's money). So the project over the weekend is to set up a dual boot on my PC - Windows for some video editing work, DVD backups, gaming and possibly iTunes (depending on how I like the Linux tools available for using an iPod) and Xandros Linux for everything else. Keeping the Mozilla Thunderbird mailstore on a FAT32 partiton would even give me access to my e-mail/address book from both Linux/Windows.

 

As I said before I find Linux a bit hard to live with for home use, for playing about with PHP/MySQL/Apache I love it, and I like doing little tweaks to it, but for every day use its just not as good as Windows.

I don't mind paying the £60 premium for Windows.

Open Office is very good, its not as user friendly as Office but I have installed this on my parents system now and they are getting the hang of it, I love the fact you can export to PDF, I email all my CVs in PDF form now, its so much better than sending a word document.

Also Open Office saves stuff in XML format, a feature Microsoft are not going to introduce to Office until late 2006.

 

I use Openoffice, although I have access to Office 2003 if I want it, I just downloaded this in 15 minutes or so, and I have an Office app that does basically everything I need.

As for PDF writing, I didnt know it did that, but I use CutePDF writer on my machine which does a good job for PDF creation.

As for Windows, most of us dont have much choice, for example linux doesnt even support my soundcard, and may never, and for other people they cant be bothered to learn something new to do the same thing.

 

I noticed the same thing last week looking for a second hand copy of Cubase SX 2. About 85% of the copies were pirate. The legit ones were a rip off too! Why don't Adobe, Steinberg etc, just grab the lot of them, they must like them for some reason!

Still I am going to be buying the legit version of SX 3 so I can have it for both my PC and Mac. I just got fed up with the bugs in the H2o version of SX 2 and I am starting to do work for people on it so I don't mind paying. £330 being the cheapest I could find, it isn't small money though!


Apple are going to make all their new computers using Intel CPU's so this means OSX will soon be available for x86 based processors. OSX and Windows are on a collision course. I really can't wait, XP is 'extra pants' OSX really is a easy to use implementation of a Linux/Unix system (actually its closer to BeOS). It's going to be amazing to watch, if Windows doesn't seriously improve I can see it falling heavily, like the giant it is. God.. XP.. I HATE it! But I have to run it for Cubase

 

I totally agree.

Yes, stumblin, we've had this argument but this is not about Photoshop prices being too high full stop (I think they are but that's the argument we already had ), but about them charging way more for Photoshop in Europe than they do in the US.

In the US Photoshop costs roughly $620, in the UK it costs roughly £455, about $820. That's a $200 markup that has absolutely no justification whatsoever and is going straight into Adobe's pockets. The same goes for Macromedia. Dreamweaver MX 2004 costs $360 in the US, £318 ($575) in the UK

Michael.

 

and isn't the average wage higher in the US as well?

 

I agree this European price rip of is getting a joke, the EU should look into this, it cannot cost any more to ship Windows to the UK than the US, they sell millions of units in the UK which means it probably costs £1 more at the most, its ecomonies of scale.

Also I am pretty sure all most of Microsoft's media is produced in Ireland, so for US sale they have to ship it much further.

 

Shipping costs don't come into it as you can buy a downloadable version of Photoshop (exact same software but no box or manuals obviously)....oh no wait...that's only available in the US :banghead:

Michael.