Many years ago, I pointed out to a friend that the computer games he was exchanging with his friends were stolen goods. Calling them "pirated", while it sounded more dashing, didn't make them any more legal.

His response was odd - he said: "Well, it's their fault for charging so much. If they charged the proper amount, I'd buy them."

Then again, perhaps not that odd. A recent internet survey showed that 53 per cent of the respondents believed copying (that is, stealing) software is not a crime because the software is too expensive.

Mr Darwyn Peachey, vice-president of research and development at Pixar animation studios, recently used the phrase "ethical lubrication" to describe this sort of logic, and he was also talking about stolen software at the time.

Of course, we don't call it stolen - that's too harsh. Software is now called "cracked" when its protection mechanisms have been defeated. It doesn't take long, searching the Web, to find cracked versions of pretty much every piece of commercial software known to man.

Mostly, these can be downloaded for free from people who just break the security for the fun of it.

Sometimes, they are resold as new by people trying to make an illegal profit.

The Hollywood effects industry now runs completely on computers and those computers rely on specialist software to create the effects we take for granted at the cinema.

Fifteen years ago, that software cost upwards of $80,000 (€88,000) per copy. In modern times, software much more powerful than those early versions is available commercially for around $5,000.

Insiders in this esoteric software industry now estimate that 30 per cent or more of this software, used by commercial companies in Hollywood, is stolen. In other words, people are knowingly running their businesses using stolen resources.

The two most common products to steal are Maya (from Alias/Wavefront) and Photoshop, from Adobe.

Thirty per cent sounds a staggering figure (one support person told me, based on his experience, he thought 30 per cent was low), but it isn't actually out of line. According to the Business Software Alliance in Washington, an estimated 36 per cent of all software in use is stolen. (In some developing countries, the estimate is 90 per cent).

But most of that is consumer software, the kind where you buy one copy of a game and then give it to a few friends, or where you own one copy of Microsoft Office, and put it on both of your PCs.

When businesses - in fact, a whole industry - start stealing software, it's time to wonder what's going on, especially since this software is their bread and butter.

Or maybe that's exactly why it's so common.

Why are they stealing software? Because many of them are running out of ways to make money doing effects and animation. The fact is, the digital effects business is a very difficult one.

The talent is expensive, the computers obsolete as soon as they are bought, and the work erratic, making planning almost impossible.

And, just to make it more fun, the competition is intense, especially now that anyone with a PC and half a brain can set up as a facility and start cranking out work. Add in producers trying to save money, who don't really understand what they are buying anyway, and you have a large number of people just a few bad weeks away from the dole.

In that atmosphere, it all starts innocently enough.

A company is on a deadline, they need a bit more capacity to finish some shots and they think, "oh, it's just this once". So they download and run the software over the weekend. And nothing bad happens. But they delete the contraband software when they are done and pretend it was all a dream.

So that went well then and, the next time, they do it again. This time, they justify it with "Alias/Wavefront owes me. That bug in the software cost me two days, so it's only fair I get some free software." And they download the software and run it. And this time it stays on the system.

Soon, they stop thinking about it. They start to bid for projects based on the assumption that they have these extra copies of the software.

It escalates - they start hiring freelancers to come and sit at workstations that are running software they never paid for.

Soon, they depend on that software being there. It's part of their theoretical capacity. They are hooked. And they are "ethically lubricating" all over the place.

The companies that do this tend to be the mid-sized ones, which means those employing between 10 and 30 people.

The small shops take some pride in being able to actually buy their software, not to mention the fact that it would be obvious if two guys in a garage had 25 copies of Maya.

And the large companies can't afford to be caught doing this. But the ones stuck in the middle are having a tough time making ends meet.

Microsoft is currently releasing XP, the latest version of its Windows operating system. Apart from an advertising campaign that sounds like extortion ("buy this upgrade, or we'll keep crashing and losing your files"), one of its "innovations" is a licensing scheme aimed at stopping people from buying one Office suite and then copying it onto a bunch of computers.

To do this, they have developed an amazingly intrusive and inconvenient licensing mechanism (because being a monopoly has its advantages). But in this case, it's hard to criticise Microsoft.

Everyone does copy their software willy-nilly, and that really is stealing it.

Of course, if they wouldn't charge so much for it, we would all pay for it.