I wonder if people have experience of purchasing software through Ebay? Currently I am looking for a sophisticated photo software, and Adobe Photoshop CS2 which costs £600 from the manufacturer is being traded for £5 on ebay. There are dozen of traders with such offers and many of them have done 100+ transactions with 100 % rating. They state they only provide the disc with registration and activation codes and the software is the full (not trial) version....

It seems too good to be true? So what's the catch?

They are pirates...trying to make some dough... plain and simple... Sorry, I cannot direct you to the ways and means of obtaining them "illegally" over the net

I gathered they are are not going to be original for that price. I don't mind the fact they are pirates. My question is will they work and give the same performance as the originals? Could their registration and activation codes become invalid after a while?

As far as I know a pirate is a copy of the original. But where do they get the codes from? If the codes are stolen from originals, what happens when the original and pirate buyer register with the same codes?