The question is not why is so much software cracked, but why people use cracked software. Spain is the first country of the so called "first world" in the piracy ranks. We can't compete with the likes of China of Vietnam, but you can swear that we piracy multimedia more than any other rich country in the world. Not only software, but also games, movies, music and even books. This happens because in Spain we have this zero effort culture that leads to us to make as much money as possible, ignoring the methods we use to achieve that. In other words, we see a thing so we want it. So that's why people uses cracked software, we want to use the best software but we don't want to pay a cent for it. Most of the people using Photosop and AutoCAD doesn't actually know how to use them. Heck, I've seen people using Photoshop as a scanner replacement software. And most of the tasks they use Photoshop for could be achieved with XnView of IrfanView. Same goes for AutoCAD.
Also, people uses cracked software because software is almost the last thing they're willing to spend money in. I used to be in this group 'til recent ages
. Being a student with no occupation doesn't get you much money (nothing at all in fact), so cracking software was the only way I could get to use some software. I didn't crack too many programs, but Diskeeper and PowerTools were in the list (I hope Jouni Vuorio isn't reading this
). Things have changed since then, and I moved to free and open source software provided that I still can't afford shareware (except for PowerTools, which I beta test). The same thing could be said about games and music. I'm slowly moving from pirated games and music to original ones (even if I didn't do it, between 60 and 70 percent of the music I have is original, and more than 90 percent of my games are original too). I don't really think that software is that much expensive, but heck, if you can get something for free, you won't think it twice. I don't think that morality and ethic will stop people in doing that, even in my case, I only stopped cracking software because of ethics (if in the future I want to make a living of this, I can't contribute to the destruction of the software industry
). In the music and games choice, I choose original because the feeling of a complete album compared with a pirated album (with the badly printed cover and no booklet) it's not the same...