Btw, as
@PorcinePicker, I'm absolutely against software piracy (or whatever IP theft), but as he said, boy oh boy, some companies give you good reasons to think otherwise.
I've already mentioned Waves in my last post. Their cracked plugins were just running better than the legit ones for quite some time. Heck, there's been people buying licences and then running the cracks.
Ok, this is solved since a long time already, but there's still situations when copy protection gets in the way of the legit user, whereas it wouldn't if you were using a crack. Just set up a new system with loads of paid plugins and you'll know what I mean. With cracked plugins it's "install, done", with legit plugins it could be "install - no, hold on, install whatever plugin manager first -, look up your credentials, enter them, find out your plugin is locked to an old computer and there's possibly no way to free the license up without actually starting the old computer (yes, that stuff still happens...), send mail to plugin company, explain the situation, wait for confirmation, etc".
Then there's events such as the recent Native Instrument drama. What if they really go completely down but you're just setting up your new precious DAW machine? You simply wouldn't be able to run a single plugin because they all require you to be able to run Native Access, connect to a server to be authorized. Once that server isn't running anymore, your plugins are worthless. Cracked versions don't suffer from that issue.
I already wasn't able to install some NI stuff anymore (even if the plugins themselves would've still be working) because their older Service Center authorization server was taken down once and forever some years back.
Which brings us to yet another point: Plugins "calling home". Even if it's just for the initial authorization (some even require online access for the download), this could get in the way. Until not that long ago all my music computing stuff was in a rehearsal room project studio with pretty much zero internet access (even mobile data WIFI setups from the phone often didn't work). I could sometimes manage to authorize things, but there was zero chance to install, say, Logic, NI Komplete or whatsoever. There's been no installers you could download and carry with you on a mobile drive, either. So I had to grab that big ass Mac Pro, take it home with me, use the wife's workspace (because I only had a laptop at home and needed a monitor) just to download and authorize software. Again, nothing cracked versions suffer from.
Now, you could obviously take care of all of that (or at least of most of it) while making purchase decisions, hence not buying anything forcing you into such maneuvers - but it's getting more and more difficult these days as lots of companies require you to be online with the target machine not only for authorisations but even for the initial download.
Anyhow, as far as the "I'm too poor, so I can't afford plugin XYZ" or "demo periods should be longer" arguments go, I call BS these days. Yes, it has been quite different when all this started, hosts and plugins have been pretty expensive and there often were no demos. Plus, there's also been very little decent freeware.
But today, there's gazillions of great free (or extremely cheap) plugins, you wouldn't even exactly have to pay for a DAW anymore (apart from Reaper, almost all interfaces come with an LE version of whatever DAW, absolutely sufficient to get you started - and possibly even more than that). You could easily do professional productions just with freeware - ok, big orchestral works might be an exception, but anything else can be done without spending any bucks. Sure, sometimes it's somewhat more work to get things together, but that's defenitely no even remotely proper justification for theft.
And fwiw, as far as my personal history goes, yes, I've learned quite some things from the occasional cracked plugin I've downloaded - but as that was before the recent millenium, I couldn't do much with it on whatever lame o/c'ed Celeron, so it was a rather academic thing.
Plus, and that's *the* main important takeaway for me: I've learned a *whole* lot more trying to get the most out of what I had and what was available for free. And even more so out of the things I've actually purchased, because when you purchase something, you don't want to regret spending that money and try to coax the best out of it (fwiw, this also applies to hardware).
