This copy of IDA was probably pirated for the same reason Photoshop is usually pirated: because it's expensive. But you don't know it was pirated.
Also: by editing your comments to account for the responses, you make the thread incoherent. I'd appreciate it if you wouldn't do that, or, at least, if you must do it, to do so in corrections at the end of your comment. It's fine to be wrong. I'm wrong all the time.
Even so, Hex-Rays does sell to individuals. It's not even necessary to ask Ilfak: if copies are being sold to individuals, then they sell to individuals. And those copies are being sold. Here's a picture of my CD, purchased this year, as an individual: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/3177211/idaomg.png
You really think this is because they want to safeguard the public or something?
Thank you for the insight into your field. Now I'm sorely tempted to try my hand at decompilation.
My point is that it is not possible to know for sure if the user of a pirated software is indeed a pirate, as there are reasons of privacy to use these editions of the IDA (as well as the most common one of just not paying for it in the first place.)
As to the question of whether Bushmanov has used a pirated edition of IDA for his work, it's interesting to note that the distributed .idb files are in two different formats - as far as I can tell versions 5.2 and 5.5, but the license key is the same for both: A2-86E4-B9BB-D3. It's not one I recognise from any of the common pirated versions but I suppose only Ilfak could tell for sure.
/*\
|*|
|*| Skype 4142 Decompression v1.002 by Sean O'Neil.
|*| Copyright (c) 2004-2009 by VEST Corporation.
|*| All rights reserved. Strictly Confidential!
|*|
|*| Date: 29.10.2009
|*|
\*/
edit: some info about this corporation and Sean O'Neil: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VEST
the official web page points to beach resort?!?
edit2: same guy: http://cryptolib.com/ciphers/skype/
The IDA Pro disassembler and the Hex-Rays decompiler are not only very expensive tools, but they are very difficult to purchase. Due to constant problems with piracy, these days they will only sell their products to three areas; (1) governments/law enforcement, (2) very well established corporations (typically well known security research people), (3) very well established university researchers.
Typically, they refuse to sell to individuals, but there is a fourth class of customers who are individuals; very old customers like me who have a perfect track record of maintaining possession of their copy of the software.
Every copy of the software is custom compiled and watermarked so it is traceable to a particular person. Every database created by the software is also watermarked, so when someone who is not a licensed customer publishes a database (.idb), the software can be traced and the account will be terminated (i.e. no further purchases allowed).
When someone does something blatantly stupid like disassembling and decompiling skype then publicly making all of the files available, it is fairly certain that they are using a illegal copy of the software. They do not understand what they're doing. They do not understand the tool they are using. And they don't have any respect for either the tool or the work of others. --All of this loudly screams PIRATE!
The pirates either don't know about or don't care about the watermarks in the databases they create. They don't realize that publishing a database is discouraged. I've never heard of a case where a database watermark was successfully forged (i.e. pin the blame on someone else), but a cracker named "Quine" once successfully removed the watermarking in IDA back in the late 90's.
The "correct" method to publicly share the research work done in IDA is to dump the database to an IDC script (an internal language), then provide the IDC script and the target binary. Customers know this, or at least they should. With that said, friends do toss databases back and forth on occasion, but that's a matter of trust between friends where both of them are customers. Some people in the InfoSec and AntiVirus crowds exchange databases, even across competing corporate lines since they're all working together towards the same goal and they've known each other for years.