I would just like to share a story, and probably an opinion as well. When I was doing my STEM undergraduate degree a couple of years ago, I took a course in which I had to use MATLAB. I won't disclose too much information, but it was a course involving computation.
Well, we (the students) weren't given a student/institutional license of any sort, but the course coordinator still insisted on using MATLAB. We took it as an implicit instruction to "somehow" obtain MATLAB. In the end, one guy in our class pirated it and distributed it the whole class.
Before that though, I did approach my course coordinator, asking them if it's possible to use other software like GNU Octave, which is a clone of MATLAB. Personally I think it should also possible to use any other programming language like Python for example, since the important part is the computation part, in my opinion. They refused any discussion and did not even consider alternatives, instead basically forcing us to "obtain" MATLAB. How else? Well.
As I have said, we all pirated it in the end.
I did something quite interesting though, which is that for every quiz, assignment, and projects that we had, I'll run the same exact MATLAB code on GNU Octave, to see if it's compatible. And it is. It works flawlessly. There's only one function that GNU Octave didn't support back the (this was a couple of years ago), and even then, it wasn't an essential feature, you could use other software for that function as well.
By the end of that semester, I had compiled almost all input/output of the MATLAB code alongside its GNU Octave's counterpart, to demonstrate that we didn't need to pirate MATLAB to get through this undergraduate course.
Regrettably though, I didn't follow through. So sad!
Do you think piracy is justified in this case?
Not from the US am from Ecuador . In my numerical analysis class my professor showd us how to pirate mathlab the first class and gave us a bunch of pdfs so we wouldn't have to buy any books. I already had my bf's uni's licence so i didn't do that but I did dabble with octave a bit on my Linux laptop. Piracy is so widespread in public universities here that nobody thinks about it as being wrong. Personally I always believe that piracy is the tool for the democratization of knowledge. I wouldn't know half of the stuff I know if it wasn't for pirated books. It's literally the reason a lot of us in south America can scape poverty.
That's interesting to me. So it has spread towards the public institution level, where many or most people think it's just normal.
Probably one of the biggest examples of justified piracy. I'm not sure if it's fully justifiable, but it is really hard to deny its benefits. One thing though, piracy as a means may be justified, but I'm unsure if it's for the ends.
Out of curiosity, what is your field of work?
Based eastern European professors do the same. Doubly hilarious because there was some freshman who was afraid of being kicked out of he were to be caught pirating by probably the same professor who showed the art of pirating for those who don't know how.
I showed the professor how to use Jackett so that was neat.