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Anti-warez Arguments

People opposed to warez typically argue that the motivating factors given by cracking groups are not authentic:

• High price is not an excuse to copyright infringement – The argument of “unreasonable price” or “could not afford the price” is not an excuse to ignore the law. The analogy is of taking goods away from a shop if the prices are too high. For that argument, if one believes that the prices are too high, the person is advised to visit other shops or to not buy the goods in question. This raises the most important implication; cheaper alternatives, especially to software, usually exist to cater to those who can’t afford the more expensive software. By pirating the more expensive software you may not be hurting the maker of the software which got pirated, but you may well be hurting the makers of less expensive software.
• Harm is larger than benefits – Although they may agree that there are some positive effects of warez on the world, they argue that its benefits cannot offset its harms. For example, copyright holders need to use their market advantage to earn a living. The warez community is competing with the revenues of the original publishers. When the industry becomes less profitable, less software, games, or music are produced. Consequently, the public will suffer.
• Illegality – They claim the morality of copyright infringement is not disputed in the legal community or mainstream society. As long as cracking groups are citizens of a society, it is not for them to violate laws at will. They would further argue that cracking and warez have no relation to civil disobedience, which is often considered legitimate. They typically justify enforcing copyright for the same reasons that laws against burglary are enforced.
• Morality – There is a wide range of alternative software available for free. Many people find that it is better to use the legal alternatives instead of using illegal copies.
• Professional pride – Taking the work of others without compensation may be morally inappropriate.
• Similarity between copyright infringement and digital property theft – Pirating software without permission is similar to copying someone’s personal information without permission, such as credit card numbers, personal password or someone’s DNA information.
• Logical fallacy of the victimless crime argument – The “I wouldn’t have bought it anyway” argument, the truthfulness of the sentence itself presumes a situation where it is taken for granted that the knowledge itself, about the chance of acquiring an illegal copy of the product in question, doesn’t in any way change the potential interest of buying it. However, if one already knows beforehand that it is possible to obtain a copy illegally, and decides to do so, there is afterwards no way of really knowing whether or not the person in question would have bought it. This is because the knowledge about the possibility of obtaining an illegal copy for free might turn down the person’s interest to buy it, so the potential chance for using warez in the first place might actually effectively sometimes become the reason for not obtaining the legal version.
• Perpetuation of Overpriced Software – Any use of a software title promotes the data formats, user interfaces, and feature lists of software titles among the community of computer users as a whole. A pirate who refuses to purchase a software title on the grounds that it is of excessive price or inferior quality still contributes to the overall acceptance and use of that software, and therefore usurps the power of the free market to eliminate a product whose price does not accurately reflect its utility. In the absence of piracy, freeware or open source software would gain a much greater acceptance against those who do not feel the perceived benefits of commercial software justify its price.
• Security – Software update functionality may be missing or unavailable to unlicensed users of software. The inability to routinely apply software updates increases the number of systems with active security vulnerabilities, and can facilitate hacking, or the distribution of spam or malicious software.