Obviously cracks are very abundant out there. But believe it or not people would rather have legal software if they are given the opportunity to do so, why? because they can freely talk about it in public with other people in the industry or on the net like in forums or user groups without being ashamed or fear of being questioned or branded as a crack user. People want to be proud of what they use.
The majority of crack users are often kids or students who are just starting to get their feet wet on the industry.
And all this software and its costs are a bit overwhelming to them. I know this because I teach a class and I have always encourage my students to use legal software to support the industry. I use legal software myself because I work professionally where it is frowned upon to be using cracks and I need to show an example to my students.
But I perfectly understand when a student chooses to use crack software instead of the legal ones because software companies are giving them such a hard time on licensing and pricing costs some of which that are out there are completely absurd. Once, I had one student that wanted to buy a certain iLok protected software but it was a bit too expensive for him so asked him to look for academic pricing there was none to be found even directly from the company so what do you think is he using now?
I think these measures could greatly help encourage the use of legal software:
1. Every company should be required to have academic pricing for all their products so that students can be encouraged to buy and use them legally early in their careers and by this I don't mean complicated school verified academic pricing in which you need the your school Principal or Dean's signature on a school's official form just to be eligible, because more often than not students just won't bother to go through that, a current official school I.D. or enrollment receipt should be enough.
2. Get rid of the useless money making fees like transfer fees, for example company A charges you an extra $100 just to transfer a product license that you own on top of the $20 the iLok charges you, why should you pay for the transfer of a software that you already own? makes no sense especially at that amount. There are numerous companies that does this. Annual fees for products that you own, I think we all know who's the guiltiest company of this. These fees are discouraging to most and would rather not engage with a company that has them.
Instead of relentlessly improving the license security systems of all the software that's out there, wouldn't it make more sense to be more open and be more inclusive towards all customers for your products by making them more accessible legally.