Haha yeah.. not exactly the same thing to claim research as your own and publishing it for for your own recognition, as downloading a game and playing it by yourself. Otherwise I myself released a hell of a game the other day, Modern Warfare 2, heard of it? I did it. Please send money to my PayPal account as apprectiation:D

If you take a piece of bubble gum from the machine

with out paying your quater, your not stealing..

Sure... that makes alot of sense, the lock is on there for looks and so is the quater slot.

I used to rent video games and to make any money at all you had to keep new titles that people want to play. So don't tell me the companies didn't make any money from the thousand or so titles that I purchased.

Well if you wanna not pay for something and use it, at least don't tell us about it!

What good would it do you? Or us for that matter.

@eggs2see: My wife works at a DVD rental place and she said they pay fees to be able to rent the games and DVDs, so renting is not piracy because money is going back to the publisher.

Selling an old used game is also not piracy because nothing has been infringed. If you were to sell and old car, or bike, or house, are you committing piracy? No, because you are selling the original work, not a copy. When you purchase a game or a computer program or music you are essentially purchasing the license to use that material. You have not purchased a license to distribute the material, or rent it and make money etc. The publisher retains that right, and they have payed to have it. If you make copies of it you are not allowed to use both at the same time. Eg, you break the law if you are at home listening to a copy of Linkin Park while your girlfriend is driving around in the car listening to the original.

When you sell a game or program you are selling your license to use that data. So if you have burnt a copy and you keep it to play you are pirating because you have forfeited your right to use the data.

The thing is when you buy a game from the shop or digital distribution you are buying the license, and any materials used to make the games packaging. It’s this license (the right to play the game) that you are infringing on. Its like driving around in an unlicensed car, or using a program where the license has expired. It’s all illegal and a ban is nothing compared to the jail sentence pirates deserve.

Does that make sense?

A few things to consider OP

Having an alt account is a bannable offence
If you actually were, as you claim, banned for stating that you own pirated games, I think you have been falsely banned. Read the forum rules, I can't remember exactly but I though it was only a bannable offence to request or supply pirated games. If you are going to protest your ban, do it by email, not by an alt's forum post and be polite

It is stealing, because stealing is a legal term and is defined by the courts.

If you were to argue that the courts should redife in, I kind of agree

piracy ruins the economy and gaming, it really it is stealing, it steals aways jobs, all at the cost of not being able to pay for the damn game >_>

They absolutely made money from every game that you bought to rent out. They also made money from the copy the guy posted to the internet. They didn't make any money on any of the rentals or any of the bittorrent downloads. So in the eyes of the game industry the renters and pirates earn them the same amount of profits, zero.

I'm not suggesting they are exactly the same thing but that's how laws work.  Laws were created to protect intellectual property i.e. a good or valuable idea that someone deserves credit/reward for which then becomes applied later in a progressively broader sense unless there is legally a good reason for not allowing the law to apply in that broader sense.

If you concede the value of intellectual property in any sense then the issue is not whether or not piracy constitutes stealing, it's that people have the right to create and the right to acknowledgement of the value of that intellectual creation, and the right to protection of that creation and all associated rewards, be they acclaim or financial. 

People can argue that it's a victimless crime or a lesser crime than actual physical theft and I can agree with that to some extent but in the sense of whether it's ethically right or wrong, it's wrong.

That's because they aren't the same. But that is not the issue at hand, piracy is a massive grey area and I'm really not interested in debating whether piracy is or is not stealing, the legality of piracy is not universal, and thus there is always going to be an arguement. I'm more concerned with the simple admission of the act being grounds for banning, when such things are not clearly stated in the rules and when proving the act even occured, was a joke, etc. The rules need to be clear on the subject, what if someone pirated a game 10 years ago and admited it? should they be banned? I've seen threads here about doing drugs, which is illegal in many countries, should that be a bannable offense too? where is the line drawn with these things?