united-states copyright criminal-law international fair-use
is there any law for using unlicensed or cracked software?
<ol>
<li>Is there any law for using unlicensed or cracked software for our personal use?</li>
<li>Can we use cracked versions of software in organization?</li>
</ol>

<p>(1) It's called copyright law, and it makes it illegal. </p>

<p>(2) You can, but copyright law says it's illegal, and may be criminal, so this might end up very, very expensive. </p>

<p>In the US, under <a href="https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201#" rel="nofollow noreferrer">17 U.S. Code § 1201 - Circumvention of copyright protection systems</a> part of the so-called Digital Millineum Copyright Act (DMCA):</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(a)(1) (A) No person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title. The prohibition contained in the preceding sentence shall take effect at the end of the 2-year period beginning on the date of the enactment of this chapter.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>...</p>
<blockquote>
<p>(a) (3) (A) to “circumvent a technological measure” means to descramble a scrambled work, to decrypt an encrypted work, or otherwise to avoid, bypass, remove, deactivate, or impair a technological measure, without the authority of the copyright owner; and</p>
<p>(a) (3) (B) a technological measure “effectively controls access to a work” if the measure, in the ordinary course of its operation, requires the application of information, or a process or a treatment, with the authority of the copyright owner, to gain access to the work.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>There are various exceptions, but none of them apply to the situation described in this question. Under the DCCA such circumvention becomes copyright infringement, and is subject to a suit for damages by the copyright owner (just as for any other infringement), and in some cases may be subject to criminal prosecution.</p>
<p>If access to or use of the content would otherwise be permitted as a fair use under US law, it has been argued that the DMCA should not apply. The DMCA itself does not provide such an exception, althoguh it does provide a mechanism for exceptions to be proposed and accepted or rejected by a regulatory process every two years. The law is not as fr as I know settled whether a fair use claim would permit circumvention. Nor is it clear that &quot;personal use&quot; would always be considered fair use, particularly if it reduced the market for the original, or would do so if widely practiced. Fair use determinations are always highly fact-driven.</p>
<p>This answer is very US-specific. The question did not specify a jurisdiction.</p>
