you think cracking his own copy of the software, which he purchased, so that it will run on windows 7, is somehow less ethical than paying the publisher another $10k for the same software that they have unlocked for window 7?

edit: here's a thought experiment. supposing he managed to build some sort of passthrough sandbox that simply intercepted one or two system calls and made the application think it was running under window xp when it was actually running under windows 7. would you find that unethical too?