There are cheaper alternatives, such as Affinity Designer, Sketch, etc, depending on your use case. As others have mentioned, even if you pirate adobe, by using their products you reinforce the influence adobe has.
Now as far as I know, there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free. I have tried a fair few open source alternatives and they are pitiful compared to adobe premiere. So while I can't recommend pirating, if you're a film student... I can understand it. It's how the industry is, sadly.
> there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free
I've only used it for fairly basic work, but DaVinci Resolve[1] seems pretty good. Not open source, but the free version is licenced for commercial use and AFAICT it seems to have a fairly complete feature set. I suspect it would be sufficient for many use cases.
Resolve is fantastic, the only thing absent in the free version that really affects me is the lack of GPU support, but I'd gladly pay if my usage increased to the point where it got in my way.
I'm pretty sure the non-studio version uses the GPU for most things (in fact Resolve doesn't work at all without a GPU supporting one of the three compute APIs), it does not, however, support encoding or decoding on the GPU. This is rather noticeable when working with h.264 source material. "Real pros" wouldn't be bothered much by this, because they'd be using post production / intermediate codecs which are fast to decode, while also not needing to produce h.264 deliverables. "Real pros" might be bothered by the free version only doing Ultra HD and not (DCI) 4K.
Resolve is probably one of the software packages with the most intelligent free / paid feature split out there. The free version is really, really good and has almost no limitations, but professionals will want the paid version to get the last few percent out of it.
There's a little bit of a learning curve to Resolve for casual use, but since Resolve 16 has gotten the "cut" page the learning curve has been flattened quite a lot I'd say. Overall it's fantastic software.
Now as far as I know, there aren't any -good- film editing alternatives that are free. I have tried a fair few open source alternatives and they are pitiful compared to adobe premiere. So while I can't recommend pirating, if you're a film student... I can understand it. It's how the industry is, sadly.