Is it really that bad? Web designers have been taking pictures of their screens for years. You still have the original 'negative' if you need the extra image quality.
Edit: There should really be a couple sample images on the project page.
Earlier HN threads called this whole thing 'marketing', I'm not going to say this wasn't an accident. I'm saying that: a thing like this, where people get excited over nothing could have been avoided with just a little notice on the download page. That would've been enough to stop this as it was going on. Giving people access to software you don't want them to use is silly.
But there is a licence required to legally use the software. They have (contact) information. To avoid confusion, Adobe could've used some kind of login to hide access to this download to people that don't have the required cs2 licence. Instead of this, Adobe gave you the option to register for a new Adobe ID. This process didn't check if you had any business on this download page. If this is truly an accident, as in, if they don't want you to use the unlicensed suite, why is this page still up? They know there's a lot of traffic coming from the blogs.
From the forums:
"
Dov Isaacs wrote:
What is true is that Adobe is terminating the activation servers for CS2 and that for existing licensed users of CS2 who need to reinstall their software, copies of CS2 that don't require activation but do require valid serial numbers are available."
On that same page users mentioned that this "looked like a legitimate product form the official web-site."
Couldn't they have made a simple password protected download page? The licence holders this whole thing was intended for already have registered an 'adobe id' (have access to the backend of the adobe website).
Learning to work with a big software package makes it harder to switch to another editing suite. Free cs2 does make sense.
It's rough but still pretty damn cool.
Software that does this from footage can easily be in the thousands of dollars.
Image the results if you pair a kinect with this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vEOmzjImsVc