My personal opinion. Pirating sucks.
Pirated things feel shallow.
On other people pirating?
Hard to say. People pretend it's cut and dry one way or the other but it isn't. Studies on the effects of piracy vary. Most legitamite studies seems to suggest it's neither helps nor hurts sales, as for most people having more songs to listen to means you listen to more music which means you buy more cds.
Most people aren't wired "well if I can download all these CDs then i'll just download them and not buy any" for some reason. Most of the people who are like that seem to be the people that didn't buy CDs anyway.
Games may or may not be different considering you need much less of them to get by. The average person only needs one every couple months. Of course the people pirating aren't exactly the average person.
Microsoft seems to think piracy is a helpful marketing tool however, as their official company line is "don't pirate, but if you do pirate, pirate our stuff and not our competitors stuff."
Then you've got general economic realities, where some people live, where a video game or computer game would cost more then they make in a couple months... so it's not a case of people being cheap so much as not being able to afford it.
So, like most things. It's not a broad "It's good" or "It's bad" thing. It's something that varies from person to person. To me it seems likely that as a worldwide phenom is likely not harming anything though. As like it's been shown with music that piracy can actually create customers because some people just won't give things a shot because price is a barrier preventing them from trying something they may or may not like.
I mean how many people actually bought a Paint Shop program or something similar without actually trying it on a school or buisness computer first? (or pirated copy.) Generally piracy tends to hurt the "bigger" guys and help the smaller guys in music. I wonder if the trend follows elsewhere.
