Can piracy be a good thing?

[Picko]

One thing piracy does do is lower prices, via creating competition. I'm not saying whether it is ethical or not but economically thats an effect of piracy.

So from a hardware perspective piracy can have three beneficial impacts, an increase due to gamers who only want to pirate software, an additional increase due to gamers who come into the market due to the lower software prices (that occur due to the competition from piracy) and finally the social aspect (my friends have one so I need one too).

That said the big three earn most of their profits off software sales so none of this benefits them. At the end of the day piracy is potentially good for the consumer, although not so good for the producer.