Uh-huh...
I just brought a new laptop that came with Vista Home (and a licence). It was so shoddy I wiped it and put XP on, for which I don't have a licence. Technically, I'm pirating, but what exactly have MS lost? I paid for one licence, I'm using one instance of their OS. It's not my fault that Vista sucks ass.
In the end, it's pretty much a zero-sum game (not quite, maybe, but mostly). There's only so much that businesses and individual users will spend on licences. If the price gets too high they'll do without or find cheaper alternatives. MS, Adobe et al rely on a tendency to want to standardize (that is, wanting to have everybody using the same software and the same file formats) to prop up their businesses. But if the cost gets too high, that tendency won't stop individuals and businesses from finding other methods. Conversion software for file formats isn't generally hard to write, even when the 'owners' of the file-formats aren't being cooperative (I speak from personal experience).
On another point, another cost to companies if licensing is strictly enforced is the cost of training (which could amount to several times the cost of the actual licence). How many companies can actually afford to train ALL their employees in Office, or Photoshop or whatever? That's the logical consequence if new users don't have access to cheap ways to self-train.
I worked in the games industry years ago, and I remember when expensive dev-kits for consoles came along (including the cartridge bays which you needed). These couldn't be circumvented. So all that happened is we had to train everybody. Whereas for PC games we could rely on newbies having done quite a lot of self-training, they COULDN'T self-train on the consoles, so our dev costs sky-rocketted. Many industries are founded on self-starting 'creatives' - does the BSA really want to throttle that?
I chose Paris Hilton because even she is capable of more incite into how the creative industries work than this article shows.
