I've noticed the Student Edition is freakin' $200 online directly from adobe. Most other places charge $120-150 but you have to get it shipped. My school sells it for $99.99 but it won't be open until mid January. There a cheap reliable place with fast shipping out there? I wantz to design with CS4 but the trail is over and all I've got is MX 2004 but that has some problems these days that I've run into.
I would not recommend doing that under any circumstances. You'll end up with pages and pages of torrent sites offering nulled versions of the software. Rather, have a look at: rm.com/thebasement/ The site offers discounted adobe products for students. Everything is legit, I know people who have used them before.
It depends on your location also ,, i mean if it was asia people would just download it from torrents and have fun with it.. in fact in India and Pakistan people might be buying it for even less than a $ in the open martket.
In Asia they buy pirated discs for less than a dollar. I know in Iran, they all speak Farsi, but Adobe doesn't (or didn't) translate the software into Farsi, so programmers buy the software, translate it, sell the pirated Farsi copies and earn a living. Once they are done with the original it is of no use to them, so my sisters friend could go down to these shops and buy bucketloads of legit commercial software in english for dirt cheap because it was simply trash to them.