Most of those use cases are untraceable.

But there’s some things you shouldn’t pirate. I was a freelance developer for a company. They hired another set of freelancers who used stock photos and music, but didn’t have the proper licenses. Had legal papers sent their way.

I learned about it because the company started demanding I provide all the proper licensing of my code and the libs I used. I have no idea what the details are or what happened. But they were pretty freaked out.

Adobe and Microsoft only kinda care about you. You’re one person. All the freelancers out there are still a fairly small part of their respective balance sheets. If you’re a freelance worker, some of your customers might require you to show valid licenses for the software you use, because they want to make sure their partners are ethical (at least, in this regard). Alternatively, you could use FOSS apps.

As someone else already said, if you are making money using commercial software, you really should be paying for it. The cost of your software should be factored into what you charge your customers. They should understand that.

I just read about Solidworks. Don’t pirate that, it still contacts home and gives them all the info it can pull from your pc: ip, your name, company info, etc. and then they send you a huge bill for the costs of 5 years or so of licensing. Also don’t have an illegal copy next to a legal one, because then the legal one will detect the illegal one and send the info. Or open projects created with pirated software with a legal version.

Of course this data snooping would be illegal in the EU, but outside that I would be careful.

Idgaf about pirating huge corpos stuff. Thats always moral. But don’t steal SFX and the like, theres just too much of it for free.

If you are so concerned, why not use alternatives

If you earn/get big enough to care about it, then you would in the first place. Most software piracy busting methods revolves around existence of a snitch who knows you’re pirating. You definitely can get away with it if you’re just pirating it yourself, but a corporation with like 100 workers cannot do it when all it takes is one person to get busted.

On sound effects / samples it depends on how many people see it, so you don’t need to worry too much unless you get popular similarly.

For assets, you would be distributing other people’s work without permission. Some companies scan online content for digital fingerprints of copyrighted material. Think Youtube content ID but they are other tools out there.

As for software you used without a license, the work you did doesn’t matter in that regard, you’re only liable for using unlicensed software by bypassing copyright protection methods. You’re not distributing it. Their DRM (even cracked) might send them enough identifiable information to sue you (in theory).

Adobe genuine service I guess. Use something like simplewall or postmaster to block them from accessing the internet or block them via the built-in firewall.

Edit: Giving away exported content is fine but be careful with the project files. They can’t figure out in what software and image or video was made in as long as you check the metadata. But project files can probably give you away.

In general they wont. The way they usually find out with small businesses is disgruntled former employees snitching (some actually offer a reward for this).

It’s encoded into the file itself which license you have

I’ve been working on a computer with pirated software for almost two decades. Graphic design, video,… There is no way anyone could know our care.

Instead of Photoshop, use GIMP. Instead of Premiere, use Da Vinci Resolve. Instead of After Effects, use Blender. Instead of Audtion, use Audacity.