What is software piracy?

What is software piracy?

Unlike other things you purchase, the software applications and fonts you buy don't belong to you. Instead, you become a licensed user — you purchase the right to use the software on a single computer, but you can't put copies on other machines or pass that software along to colleagues. Software piracy is the illegal distribution and/or reproduction of software applications or fonts for business or personal use. Whether software piracy is deliberate or not, it is still illegal and punishable by law.
Piracy comes in many forms. Here are some common piracy methods:

• Licensed user duplication for unlicensed users
• Illegal Internet distribution
• Illegal use of Adobe® Acrobat® over a network
• Distributing specialized education versions to unauthorized markets
• Distribution of inauthentic Adobe software or fonts

ADOBE photoshop cs5

Adobe Photoshop CS5

Adobe Photoshop is the market-leading image editing application made by Adobe Systems of San Jose, CA. Although originally designed for editing images for print, Photoshop is used today for a wide range of other amateur and professional purposes.

- Facts -

1. Adobe discourages use of "Photoshop" as a verb, as in using photoshopping to refer to photo editing or image manipulation, to prevent its trademark from becoming a genericized trademark.[15] Nevertheless, photoshop is commonly used as a verb.

2. Adobe is currently developing Photoshop CS5, which is expected to be released in April-2010. In a video posted on this Facebook page, the development team revealed the new technologies under development, including three dimensional brushes and warping tools.

3. (the history of Photoshop)
In 1987, Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program, which had been renamed ImagePro. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.
During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing program code. Photoshop 1.0 was released in 1990 for Macintosh exclusively.

4. Photoshop has strong ties with other Adobe software for media editing, animation, and authoring. The .PSD (Photoshop Document), Photoshop's native format, stores an image with support for most imaging options available in Photoshop. These include layers with masks, color spaces, ICC profiles, transparency, text, alpha channels and spot colors, clipping paths, and duotone settings. This is in contrast to many other file formats (e.g. .EPS or .GIF) that restrict content to provide streamlined, predictable functionality.