copyright software legal-terms
Is it illegal to use an unsupported version of software, without a license key?
<p>there is this particular computer program, that I [possibly, for legal purposes can't say for sure] may have downloaded, well, "illegally", a.k.a., they require a license key to get the full version, but I (may have) found a hack online that allows me to get a license for the full version for free.</p>

<p>So, this was back in 2014, and I haven't used it in a while. However, now I (may) have felt bad about it, and want to whats legal (if I may have not already), so I looked on their <a href="https://www.techsmith.com/video-editor.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">website</a>, and tried to contact them, but it appears the version I had [possibly] illegally, version 8.2, is no longer supported at all, so am I allowed to keep the program on my computer, and continue using it, if there's no possibe way to get the legal version (of that particular version, 8.2, which is the only one I;m interested in) now?</p>

<p>Their <a href="https://support.techsmith.com/hc/en-us/sections/360003900952-Terms-and-Policies" rel="nofollow noreferrer">terms of service</a>, as far as I could find on their website, doesn't mention a case like this.</p>

<p>Any ideas? Can one continue using a software that was originally downloaded illegally, if at this point in time it is impossible to download the legal version, even if one were to pay? Do software licenses become obsolete when the software is officially unsupported?</p>

<h2>Yes, it’s illegal</h2>

<p>The copyright you are breaching is still valid. It is up to the copyright owner if they want to allow you or anyone else to use their software.</p>

<p>It sounds like you're thinking of this as "The license is what restricts me from doing what I want, so if the license expires, then I'll be able to do what I want."  But that's exactly backwards.</p>

<p>To use an analogy with firewalls, copyright law is "default deny".  The basic premise of copyright law is that <em>nobody</em> is allowed to copy a copyrighted work, <em>unless</em> they have the permission of the copyright holder, or some other exception applies.  (As gnasher729 noted in a comment on another answer, at least under US law, running a computer program is considered to be copying it, when the program is loaded from disk into memory.)  A license agreement is what gives you that permission; remember that the literal meaning of the word "license" is "permission".  It usually comes with many restrictions saying that you only have permission to use or copy the software in certain ways, or if you fulfill certain conditions or obligations, but at its heart it's a <em>permissive</em> document.</p>

<p>So if you once had a license, but it has expired or is no longer valid, then your permission to use the software has gone away, and we fall back on the default policy of copyright law: deny.  In this case it's even worse, because you never had a license in the first place.  </p>

<p>Whether or not the software is <em>supported</em> has no relevance to any of this.</p>

<p>The only way that the passage of time would allow you to copy the work would be if its <em>copyright</em> had expired.  Unfortunately for you, under the copyright laws of many countries, that will only happen many decades later.  Under US law, for instance, it's something like 120 years after the work's creation - so you'll be able to use the software legally in the year 2134 (unless of course the law changes again in the meantime).</p>
