when one day your income all depend on sales from any of the items you mentioned, then you might know why... 

Really wish this thread had a poll, I'd be curious to see the numbers.

It's actively stealing the fruits of labor from a lot of people. Jay Z isn't the only person who profits from his songs. The people who did all the sound engineering to make him not sound terrible, the people in marketing, the people in PR, whoever ACTUALLY wrote the song, the guys who drive the trucks to deliver the physical media, the guys on the back end to deliver the digital media... Its looking at all of their hard work and saying that they did that for you, free of charge.

I used to be a pirate. I've paid for 3 PSP games, but I've played nearly all of them. And I feel partially responsible for the low software sales of the system. A system that I wanted to succeed.

Any animosity I have towards pirates now would stem from their arguments about WHY they pirate. Don't make up some lame excuse. Don't tell me you're poor, or you can't afford it. And definitely don't tell me that you wouldn't have paid for it anyway. These are all awful excuses for the real reason: you're cheap/don't want to pay for it.

This reminds me of a great quote that fits right in with this topic.

"You should act in a way, that if everybody acted like you, things would be alright."

That's my problem with piracy. You're getting things for free off the backs of the people who are actually paying for it. Because if nobody was paying for it, it wouldn't exist.

It's not the end of the world, but it's a shitty thing to do.

What I don't get is people that don't consider things piracy even though they are.

Listening to music on youtube? THAT'S PIRACY.

Playing an old game online? THAT'S PIRACY.

Downloading a copyrighted image. THAT'S PIRACY.

You wrote a lot to justify pirating. You realize that means you know it's wrong and you just try and make excuses for yourself to do it anyway, right?

That seems like a very different scenario. That would be the equivalent of me seeing a game and trying to reproduce it/ make it again through reverse engineering. That is legal if I am not mistaken. It gets illegal if I try to distribute said copy seeing as how it uses the most likely uses patented designs of the car.

piracy doesn't involve stealing a game, it involves stealing (taking something that does not belong to you) the right to play a game.

a better comparison would be tickets to a amusement park. If you get free fake tickets and you pass through, then you have stolen admission into the park. Or if you steal a free ride into a plane. This isn't the typical kind of theft we are used to but it is theft. All of this is no different than just forcing your way into something, which is illegal.

I download music, movies and series all the time. If I had to pay for them, I wouldn't ever do it. So it's not like those people are losing sales from me, they would never see my money anyway.
This way, they can at least hope that I like what I hear/see and that I will recommend it to somebody with much higher moral standards who will buy the product.

I had X360 and happily pirated all the games, so MS at least made money from the console, Kinect and two extra controllers that I bought. If they enabled XOne to do the same, I'd gladly buy it.

Replace the thread title with "Why is there so much negativity toward petty crime?" and there probably wouldn't be any sort of conversation. Because negativity towards petty crime is well justified. Well perhaps not calls for chopping people's hands off. But negativity from the perspective of "it's wrong, people shouldn't do it, and people who do do it should be dealt with in a manner proportional to the seriousness of their offense", is completely the right response.

I have done a lot of pirating myself but know that it is damaging to the industry. I hardly do it today because now you can get everything really cheap, so it is not a problem. I don't think it should be considered illegal but I do think it is right if companies prevent piracy.