I object to the obscene prices many companies charge for their software, but I still don't agree that that's a good enough reason to load up a shop with a truck full of CD-Rs and start selling them to unsuspecting customers.
They're not always unsuspecting customers.
In Thailand, and many parts of Asia, there are shops that sell pirated movies, software, and games in just about every shopping mall. There are some malls (such as Pantip Plaza or Fortune Town's IT Mall) that have countless shops that carry pirated material and nothing else. You can get a DVD-R full of pirated software for about $3. They charge by the disc, and not by the contents.
Game publishers have actually started publishing games here which are labeled for sale only in Thailand at a much lower price than you can get them in the USA or other places (I payed about $10 for an authentic copy of Mass Effect, it's $50 in the US last time I checked). However, software companies like Microsoft won't offer such a discount and the average person here doesn't want to pay 3,500 baht (about US$120) for Windows XP Home or 17,000 baht (about US$530) for Windows Vista Ultimate.
It's not always that they don't know they're getting pirated copies, it's that they don't care given the price of getting an original.
