Piracy is not morally justifiable, but it is not as bad as outright theft, nor can be equatable to it. Piracy is like half the moral wrong of theft. You're getting something you didn't earn without permission, but you're not "taking" a good or service from somebody else.

Personally, i'll pirate abandonware, especially something like, say, the whole series of SWAT Kats, which was never legitimately put on DVD, and is only available on a TV channel that isn't supported by advertisements anyway

Lack of marketing and availability, cheaper(read:free) product available, overpriced "original"products.

I dont think anyone wants to steal. At the same time I think companies dont price their goods fairly. Its rather unfair for corporations that own almost all the movie/publishing rights to say.. look this is a free market.. we'll charge what we can. And not expect people to go, your robbing us.. screw you.

Im against it now, when i have money to buy games and stuff,
but when i had psOne i didn't have one original game... had no money for it.

errr....
by piracy, do you mean copying stuff and reselling it (the real kind, which is bad in every sense)
or file sharing, for which you trade music recorded on the radio, or shows recorded on TV or movies recorded on TV.... afterall, no one eversaid that you couldn't record something that airs and then pass it on... "hey I made you a mixed tape" ... or VHS sales? the industry made loads of cash from that... but now that CDs are cheap... it's a big NO NO.... it's just hypocrism.

Now software, I can't really use the same annalogy, there really is no way to justify it.

But for me, anything that airs (TV or radio) should be void of copyrights for all non professional/ profit usage (in other words, average joe should be legally alowed to DL that cause he could have had he turned on his TV). Now i'm not saying companies shouldn't sell them anymore... just that this is just the service of putting something available on a clean and neat medium and that is the only added value...

My opinion is that piracy is statistically insignificant as far as profits go.

As it is, theft if is an already accounted for cost in all retail goods. Everything from a pack of gum to mp3 players is marked at a price that accounts for retail shrink (loss occuring due to theft or negligence), and these are circumstances where the proper owner finds themselves without their property.

In the case of piracy no physical goods are taken, meaning that even if it did represent a lost sale it's not a loss of the product. In turn that means the kid who walks off with a pack of gum does more damage to the store than if, somehow, he could have downloaded it instead. This means it takes far more piracy to be equivalent to actual theft, and on top of that the existence of piracy has very likely led to a reduction of actual theft. This, of course, means the one has the potential to offset the other, and as such it's difficult to say that piracy losses are significant even if we assume that it represents a lost sale.

And that's the biggest leap - we have to assume that they would have bought the game if they couldn't pirate AND that they didn't pirate after they discovered the game was worth buying. This is something that is virtually impossible to verify. Generally speaking, people want to pay for the goods they consume - this is a fact backed up by psychological research. As such, it has to be assumed that at least some portion (and perhaps a very significant portion) of pirates do so for lack of funds. If a person simply can't afford to buy something they won't, and those people cannot in good conscious be counted as lost sales.

Overall, there's no significant data that conclusively proves any business is impacted by piracy whatsoever. Perhaps there's an abundance of anecdotal "evidence" and there are certainly many claims being made by businessmen (a class of people that will tell you they aren't cutting prices one day so they can turn around and "surprise" you with a cut 24 hours later, might I mention), but there's just no hard evidence of the impact at all.

I'm against piracy now,But if I added my pirated ps2 titles in my collection ,believe me, it would have been more than 100 games :P

Piracy is theft, plain and simple, and the law needs to catch up. This doesn't mean that companies should be allowed to use Any Means Necessary to fight it: even now, many companies are using unethical means to an end that might otherwise be good, had they not tainted it. But they are fighting a legitimate problem, even if they are not using legitimate means.

Depends what you mean about piracy.

To my way of thinking piracy is the criminal activity of duplicating copyright material and selling it to make money when you have no legal right to make money from that material. This I utterly detest and there is no moral, ethical or legal justification for it.

However that's not to say I am against other forms of copying copyright material for free distribution.

I'm very sympathetic towards the Richard Stallman (of GNU+Linux fame) view of copyright (or copyleft as he terms it). If you make money of someone else's material then you owe them. If you distribute it without charge but ensure the receiver knows who created the material then you owe nothing and you're doing nothing wrong. If you modify the material and distribute it free of charge then as long as you acknowledgte that what you've distributed has content derived from someone else (and you identify that someone else), then you are all clear. Just don't try to claim someone else's material as your own.

I'm sorry, but what you're doing here is essentially demanding that the Legal definition of the word of the word "theft" be changed.  The reason why piracy isn't legally considered to be theft is because there is a very specific definition of the word "theft" that pre-dates you by centuries.  There is no valid reason to change the definition of the word.  In fact, the law relies on its interpretation and implementation to be consistent in order to be fair.  If you change the Legal meaning of even a single word can in turn change the meaning of many, many laws as well as the way in which they are implemented.

Please, please don't make stupidly ridiculous suggestions like this again.  You simply have no concept of the magnitude to which consistency in legal definitions protects the common, law-abiding citizen.