I live in France where Adobe are selling Creative Suite 3 Design Standard for 2,032.00 euros for the full version which today converts to 3,113.43 USD. There is no way I can afford that and I'm desperate to switch from fireworks CS3 to photoshop and illustrator. I found a power seller on ebay.com selling a full version for $695 euros, here is their explanation of the low price:

Most software manufactures, including Adobe, offer upgrades when new versions of their popular software are released. These reduced price upgrades are offered to those that qualify. There is NO difference between the upgrade and the retail package except requirements. What we offer is a way for those that don’t have previous licenses needed to take advantage of the upgrade offers. We bundle a qualifying previous version retail license with the Upgrade to the latest version. This bundle is far below the going price for a retail package alone.
Creative Suite 3 Upgrade + Previous Version = Full Retail Creative Suite 3

Is this legal? Incidentally, the suite is available on amazon.com for $700+ USD but they won't ship overseas.

The ebay link is:

http://cgi.ebay.fr/Adobe-Creative-Suite-3-Design-Standard-for-Windows_W0QQitemZ200206822573QQihZ010QQcategoryZ185QQrdZ1QQssPageNameZWD2VQQcmdZViewItem?_trksid=p1638.m122

Try GIMP - it's legal and free. It's not quite Photoshop, but it is a very feature rich image editing and graphics creation program.

Well the seller has 100% feed back.
That usually tells something.

If you concern that the software you getting is pirate virsion then the only way to ckeck it is to
buy and activate the product. If product is legal the activation will go through fine.

I agree CS3 pretty good thought I don't like some UI changes they made but as far as performence is much better then CS2.

Cheer, DS