Personally I don't see the problem in downloading a program to see its features and if you like the workspace. Sometimes a video and demo images just arn't enough to know if it fits you. That is, if they don't offer a free trial for 30 days or whatever. Also some programs just ask too insane of a price for a non-commercial use. Terragen is in a perfect area for me being a college student and wanting something fun to play around with as my personal toy. However, I also enjoy playing in 3ds Max some, and Dreamweaver, and Photoshop. I've been teaching myself web development since I was 10, and quickly outgrew frontpage (ewww). I then really had nowhere to go but these huge expensive programs that I wanted just to learn with not make money off... So maybe I found a copy somewhere for awhile... However, first thing on getting to college I bought the Creative CS3 suite (yay college discounts for educational copies being a total of ~360 bucks). Even then it was expensive but my parents helped pay for it and called it a birthday present. As for 3ds Max, I usually use various demo copies and play around, but maybe once I can find a nice book (any suggestions anyone? for a complete beginner) or a decent course in it I might consider actually buying it, especially if I can find a decent educational price.
The main problem I see with software (from a younger student view), is the fact I want to learn all these programs that might be in my future, but its hard for me to actually learn when the price tag on these things is for huge corporate companies planning to make profits off the software, and our society says downloading the program for free even though I plan to have 0 profit on it is illegal. It wasn't until college that I could even start looking at the educational prices and even then most of them are still a little outrageous for a college student. Software companies really should encourage giving away their software free to educational purposes. Actually, Microsoft does exactly that with some of their software (wow, something Microsoft did that I like). I can get a copy of Visual Studio 2008 and such from them, though my school also offers it with my software package (that cost like 300 bucks for the latest version of office enterprise and 2003 version, norton enterprise, like 3 versions of windows xp, 2 versions of vista, visual studio 2008 and 2005, etc etc etc).
Anyways, I also don't see the point of this topic either, as warez, pirated software, and models hasn't ever been discussed until you started this topic. There was one mention in a previous topic that mentioned he pirated software as a trial because no trial was offered and that was it. But in my few months browsing these forums I can't recall a single other time someone has mentioned piracy or especially stealing models. Every model I've seen offered is there work, offering it to us to use cause they are awesome (I especially <3 lightning). And while people sometimes may forget where they got a model from and who by, they often will admit they forget for sure but can somewhat remember from where to help someone else find it so they can use it too and then also give credit. I personally know some of the models in my library I have no clue who made them anymore, but I could easily search this forum for them and give them credit should I ever use them.
One idea I would like to see is if that people who make models could please start leaving a .txt or a .pdf with their model (and preferably like if you have awesometree.tgo, make it awesometree.txt or .pdf), and inside just some instructions on how to leave credit (like a preferred name or a list of 2 names depending on what forum your on, etc)