I finally had to give mine up. Needed to reset the password which required a trip to 4HELP office and I live halfway around the globe now. But the kiddo will be starting college soon so I can mooch off their edu email address.

Ah, I've been mooching off an old library card for years to rent books for my Kindle. Finally got an email saying "Just pop into your local branch to renew this year." Ah...

YES! I was a happy Kanopy movie viewer until last year I got a message that my library card no longer worked on Kanopy and I had to physically go in to the library to get a new one. Maybe someday....

You have to renew them? I've been using the same card since '03. I went in a 2 years ago to pay my fine for a book lost in the couch cushion for a few months. Librarian thought it was quaint that I still have my old tattered library card.

This was Chicago. I believe a lot of people had managed to get online cards without physically being in the city and they decided to call it in and get everyone to renew in person to see who was still legit.

That almost never works for me, they usually use a service that verifies current student enrollment like SheerID.

If you are planning anyway to break the terms of the license and effectively steal the software, why even bother paying something for the privilege? Just get it for free, surely it has to be available cracked

> break the terms of the license and effectively steal the software

We're all (mostly/some) software people here, you don't need to use terms established by the "anti-piracy" firms to make your point, no one is "stealing" anything here, even if they were getting it for free from TPB or whatever.

Indeed. But people are stuck on these archaic unrelated terms for now. AI firms will make the whole thing obsolete while luddites cry about “stealing from artists” and stuff like that.

> But people are stuck on these archaic unrelated terms for now

Seen it in media for decades at this point, which makes sense, most people can't tell up from down.

What's sad is hearing those things echoed here of all places, a community for hackers, and people are repeating the words of the MPAA.

>luddites cry

oh come on I thought we had gotten past this crap

When I moaned to the Adobe support person about a recent price hike they said "It's a real shame you haven't signed up for a free educational course online, like the ones from Google, that would qualify you for a student plan. Or have you? I'll wait here while you tell me if you are enrolled in one of those free Google courses. Take as long as you need."

So now I'm getting an education too.

Cracked software has risks attached to it, such as malware.

Spare me the morality play. Apple gifted Donald Trump a 24k gold statue! They will gift me an educational discount to Final Cut Pro.

There was no morality play. My point is your copy/use of software is equally "illegal" whether you just download a cracked copy or pretend to be an active college student and pay the student price, when you are not in fact an active college student. Either way, you won't have a valid license. So why bother paying?

This is quite the slippery argument IMO. So it’s not about morality, it’s about legality. But also it’s about paying for a valid license, so they shouldn’t pay at all?

I mean, why not? I barely use FCP, sometimes to trim a movie in places. I'm still going to be subsiding other users. I'd rather not pirate.

won't somebody think of the poor trillion dollar company!