I'm sorry but your argument that someone who buys legitimate software will produce better work is just ridiculous.
Mastery comes from practice, not sheer will - someone who has to work all summer to acquire Illustrator is going to be far less skilled than someone who spent the entire summer learning Illustrator on a pirated copy.
Almost every talented designer I know acquired their skills this way. I went to an art school and you could literally see the difference in skill level between students who had pirated & mastered software vs students that waited until college to get the educational license.
I ran circles around those people and ended up making money tutoring them. I got a head start on my career by freelancing during college because I learned the software before I attended school. I took jobs away from those people and left them in the dirt because of instead of waiting & saving for the upgrades I could master new features as they were released.
I honestly attribute most of my success in life to pirating software as a student.
Oh and the best artists routinely steal each other's work and have their work stolen. They just call it "inspiration".
How do you know you wouldn't be better in some other way if you had not pirated the software? Perhaps you'd be great in another field, and stealing kept you from finding that out.
I think that it is as possible to escape the negative consequences of bad behavior as it is to escape the laws of thermodynamics.
Is this honestly what you believe? That a poor student learning on pirated software can condemn themselves - by sheer act of moral fate - to a negative path in life?
Who determines "bad behavior" exactly? You know, in my world view, publicly casting your own subjective moral judgment on someone else is considered "bad behavior".
Put another way: change "a negative path in life" to "a path in life lower by some amount (however small) than what it could have been otherwise", and you'll have an accurate rendition of what I think.
Yes, I honestly believe what I said, and I don't think that what I've written below invalidates it (but if it does, please tell me - I'd love to know!)
I didn't mean that someone that pirates software as a student is necessarily fated to outright doom, which is implied by "a negative path in life". We all have free will, and can choose to do better (or worse) every time we make a decision.
I contend that the consequences of piracy are indeed negative, overall, for that person's selfish interests, long-term. However, the magnitude of that consequence depends on the context. While nothing can make a bad action good (remember that good and bad imply a context), many people are good enough that a few small bad decisions won't destroy them completely. Consider the case of a person that's excellent in all aspects of their life except for one: on Sundays, they travel to a nearby store and write obscene messages on the mirror in the bathroom with a bar of soap. They're still very awesome, happy and successful, but they could be just a little bit better (richer, happier, more well rested, whatever) if they chose to do something else.
Mastery comes from practice, not sheer will - someone who has to work all summer to acquire Illustrator is going to be far less skilled than someone who spent the entire summer learning Illustrator on a pirated copy.
Almost every talented designer I know acquired their skills this way. I went to an art school and you could literally see the difference in skill level between students who had pirated & mastered software vs students that waited until college to get the educational license.
I ran circles around those people and ended up making money tutoring them. I got a head start on my career by freelancing during college because I learned the software before I attended school. I took jobs away from those people and left them in the dirt because of instead of waiting & saving for the upgrades I could master new features as they were released.
I honestly attribute most of my success in life to pirating software as a student.
Oh and the best artists routinely steal each other's work and have their work stolen. They just call it "inspiration".