Laws on pirating outdated software?

lexidobe · July 19, 2019

1 hour ago, homeap5 said:

I want to back to original question for a moment.

I thought about that and I think there may be some reason for keeping rights to software that is no longer sell. For example - Microsoft don't want to sell Windows 98 anymore, because it's old, outdated operating system and people should update their software (and hardware). And that is right. So what about people who wants to use very old computers for fun? Well, still Microsoft can't allow using their software for free or release it as free version - imagine how many people will try to use it only because it's free. I was thinking about advertisements like "old computer prepared for old games with original operating system - vintage - everything works perfec like in 1998 including internet - all drivers installed!". And it starts to be good business for people who wants to sell old crap. And number of infected zombie computers will grow. Ok, win98 may be not a good example, but XP or Vista? Microsoft no longer supports these OSes but they still can be useful (and potentially dangerous because lack of updates).

That makes sense, I never thought of it like that. However, if someone wants a free OS or they need one and can't afford one, I kind of doubt that they are going to choose an old version of Windows just because it's legal when the internet is full of free downloads for any version of Windows. That is unless they just prefer the older version, in which case they probably wouldn't care whether it's legal.

However, that logic may apply to other software more. For example, if it was legal to pirate any software that wasn't the latest version and a person (or worse, a business) wanted or needed Photoshop, a lot of people and companies would probably download the older version of the software free and just use that.

Not that I would want to, but what do you think the odds of an individual actually getting in legal trouble for pirating a very old version of Windows would be? I presume the odds would be extremely low since (to the best of my knowledge) individuals basically never get busted for pirating the current version of Windows. Am I wrong?