Hello

There are a lot of " cheap software " sites on the web
I quote one of them just as an example

www.oemsoftdiscount.com/ -

Are they legal ?
In the F.A.Q. Why so cheap ?
They speak of O.E.M stw , no manual, no upgrading etc
Does it make sense ?
On the other hand, If they are not legal why are they not banned , such as , for example the pedophile sites ?

I asked a long time ago, and this is what i came up with:
http://www.opserver.de/ubb7/ubbthreads.p...true#Post208338

I bought some software from one of these sites several years ago and it worked out well.
I tried to research whether it was legal and what I found out at that time was that the software manufacturer was aware of these sites and did not like them but at that time it was legal.
A lot of this stuff is OEM which means it is supposed to be tied to a new computer and you are not able to transfer it to another computer. How it works is a computer builder orders a bunch of OEM software which is usually 1/2 price and then marks it up and dumps it on the web. Don't know how you get $50 Cs4 extended.
The software I bought i got a low price and I was able to register it and use it for an upgrade later on. It was a Microsoft product and if they said it was legit then who am I to argue?
Don't know how it fits in to the piracy argument. I used a legit credit card on a site that looked legit.

No they are not legal, just call adobe to find out what they tell you!

You can get some legal deals on some of these sites though.
I forgot to mention that the software I bought was one generation behind the one that was current at that time. So I think it was a good deal.
You would have to do a lot of sweet talking to get me to believe that you can legally get photoshop at $50.
You can also check to see if a site is legit by contacting verisign... or whoever is processing the credit cards. Also the credit card companies sometimes keep lists of bad sites.

christian, microsoft products have an actualy oem version for thier products, things like zbrush do not, so they are lying claiming that it is oem when a oem version doesnt even exist.

It is what I thought
Most of their sofware are not O.E.M.
Anyway , why are they allowed to have a web site then ?

If you do a Whois on the domain name you will discover that it is a Russian web site. What is illegal in some places is not in others.

For anyone purchasing and downloading the software sold at sites like this, you don't need to worry so much about whether the company selling the software is legal or not, but whether YOU are obtaining the software in a legal manner according to YOUR country.

ok but this does not explain the reason why these sites are not banned in the western countries
I dont think that it is possible to advertise world wide any kind of illegal activities just opening a site in Russia

The site is Russian and hosted in Russia. How could anyone outside of Russia shut it down? What they are doing may not be illegal in Russia and so no one in Russia is going to shut it down. And most countries are not censoring the web so we can go wherever we want on it.