Surely those offers must be for illegally copied software.
Even to amuse myself I would never click such links -- there's no way to know what might be lurking on one of those web sites.
A guess about why someone isn't doing something about it. Surely they're trying. But even wealthy software companies must find the anti-piracy investigations daunting. Software pirates are all over the world and can easily move around. Piracy also plagues the music industry. I happened to see a video made by a Brazilian musician concerned that his style of music is dying out. The video includes images of street vendors with bins full of illegally copied music CDs. These sales take place daily right out in the open -- nobody stops them. Record companies can no longer make the profits they require due to extensive piracy of some kinds of CDs. For this reason, he says, they are ever less willing to pay composers and performers for their work. He believes his entire genre of music is seriously at risk, for sheer lack of income. What a tragedy that would be. It's wonderful music.
Years ago someone I know gave me his (boxed but no longer shrink-wrapped) copy of a major software product. I didn't bother with a sanctimonious lecture, but I never took the CD out of the box. The irony: at the time he was a manager at a software company.
Some years later he and a friend launched a small music business, making field recordings of certain ethnic music. They traveled to far-away places to get their records, worked their fingers to the bone on the projects, and eventually released some excellent and award-winning CDs. It didn't take long for pirated copies of the music to begin appearing on the streets and even on one of the major "e-tail" sites. There is little he and his partner can do to stop this. They just don't have the time or money to track down and deal with the copyright violators. Hard way to learn a lesson about distributing copyrighted material illegally. I hope he did learn it. Some other friends are sort of cavalier about this sort of thing. When they're on the verge of a business trip to Asia, it's: "Hey, you guys want us to bring you back some movies on DVD? They're only a dollar and a half or something."
No thanks.
