I run my life by morals, not by law, but with a risk tolerance bounded by the effects of law.
That said, my moral interpretation of closed-source software is that I can do whatever the hell I want with it as long as I'm not distributing it to others without permission. Anything that enters my private residence, whether it be a CD I may have bought, or a very long byte array that got transmitted into my internal LAN in return for a payment, is fair game for me to do anything I want with, as long as it doesn't reach anyone outside.
Modifying the binary is not same as copying .
Also given thay Adobe has failed to their side of the agreement, there is some legal standing.
Ofcourse it has to be tested in court, unlikely Adobe will even sue if they knew. I don't think they care one way or another. And the customer using cs2 still is unlikely to sue as it's not going to be a large enterprise.
This is just laziness from Adobe , older servers take effort to maintain. They could be using keys that have expired to be signing the auth request for example.
You own a CPU. Because you own that CPU, you get to play gatekeeper and decide which parts of that bytearray go to your CPU and which ones don't. That's not for Adobe to decide.
The bytearray they send you is just a suggestion of what to run on your CPU. They provided you a suggestion in return for a payment.
You don't have to run all of that suggestion. You can selectively run parts of it.
What hardware are you running that old crap code on anyways? If you are in the video world today, those old versions of software can't even handle HD let alone 4K/8K. I couldn't even imagine trying to run RAW video without GPU support. Why are people so clinging on to software that only allows work from 10-15 years ago? Times have progressed. The old software doesn't support anything I need it to today (maybe I could get by with an old version of PS except for today's RAW formats would bring it to its knees).
Nonsense. The disks are your property and you're entitled to use them as you see fit (except when that use is illegal e.g. copyright infringement - and note that copyright does not cover the transitory copies made as part of running the application).
Err, umm, no. You purchased a license to use the software.