It's not illegal in the US either. It's covered under Fair Use.

Even the Net Act requires that he distributes the copyrighted works for it to be illegal.

Piracy is a massive force in this industry, particularly about sales.

Therefore banning the ability to openly talk about something which hugely effects sales on a forum about sales is just plain stupid.

1. It is legal to own software, unless you distribute it too. Torrent is a legal gray area, vere in Hungary, there is no law against it, and no one was convicted for it. Ever. Afaik it is the same in the USA, but I'm not sure, anyways, it is the same in several countries.

2. It is especially surprising, how some of you are so ignorant, that you basically say "PIRACY IS WRONGWRONGWRONGWRONG! ICANTHEARYOU!!! WROGWRONGWRONGWRONG!!!
There are many pirates who try to reason it, and they deserve at least the arguement of their opinion getting banned.

3. The most common reasons are:
"I wouldn't want to buy it anyways, so I'm not hurting the industry"
"I couldn't buy certain games at my location, so I just download them."
"I'm poor, so my other option is to quit gaming altogether, without helping the industry"
"I don't believe in the moral right to "copyright" things, art should be free"


4. Just some interesting:
Here, in Hungary, everyone I know does it. It is perfectly normal, and accepted. Until I learned English good enough to visit forums like this, I didn't even hear about the concept of piracy. It was perfectly natural that game CDs are copied from my friends when I need them, that as a little child I play Mario on PC, or that my little sister asks me to download the new Sims.
If I would show up with original games, my friends would laugh at me for paying for something that is free anyways. Most of them believes it is common sense that PS3 fails in the sales because there are no proper (pirated) games for it, assuming that really EVERYONE is pirating stuff over there, too. I'm not making this up.

All I have to say is wow. Piracy may be wrong to some people, but banning them from the site is taking it to far. I don't think its bad. And don't tell me you havnt downloaded a song from limewire or forstwire before. All 50 plus of my ps2 games are pirated and most of my ps2 ones were. If you wanted a nice BMW that came with insurance, and you knew for example you could get a clone of the BMW without insurance for free or much cheaper (but its made by the same company) would you take it?

You just described Argentina...and probably every other 3rd world country in the world. I can fully attest that's true

Maybe we should ban all poor ppl on this site?  That will prob make starcraft happy.

I support this. Should be a rule to not talk about illegal practices such as this in the first place anyways. If you pirate and mod, you slap the game industry in the face and slowly start to burn it away. Shouldn't be allowed on a gaming site with such heresy. You break the real law and then talk on a forum about it should be against the rules. Good thread starcraft.

Well nevermind just look at rule 14.  You are forbidden to engage in illegal activies.  I'm sure that can be interepreted (or adjusted) to mean discussing it as well.  So there is already grounds to ban them. 

Starcraft, if you want to go somewhere where you can get banned for even circumstantial admission of piracy, you may want to check out neogaf. They take the hardest line to piracy that I've ever seen on an internet forum. Their approach inhibits proper discourse because people are afraid to lose their accounts by saying the wrong thing.

As for VGC policy, at least a dozen people have already said why this isn't a good idea so I won't bother. Kudos VGC users, this is one piracy thread that actually contained some very good posts.

I disagree, we're punishing people on something outside, and irrelevant to the forum. Rules should only be based on a objective criteria of whether or not it disturbs the running of the forum (hence why banning for trolling is a touchy subject).

@Zucas

I think most people here are talking about Downloading not Distributing.
Downloading is not copyright infringement if it's for personal use.