"A pirating gamer isn't some dirty scum that you disrespect. They are customers. They tell their friends. They're ordinary people. Some games have 80% of their installs due to piracy.

If you can convince even a small percentage of these customers to pay, you win big. Especially in the game of software development."

It's human nature. If someone can get something for free, most will. People don't like parting with their money. This is why you can't make a business out of donation-ware.

However, it's a problem when the torrent and other illegal sites get keywords in the major search engines for legitimate businesses. Many users will go to those sites first and not end up purchasing the legitimate version. You can't tell me that this doesn't effect sales (The actual amount of sales is up for debate).

There also aren't any real stats on how many people that download illegal software actually end up purchasing something from that company in the future.

In my experience, the only reason these people actually purchase software is because the cracks are too difficult to obtain/too much of a pain in the ass or the company they are working for requires it.

Eventually, I think most software will eventually become services. This way, there is no code to share.

It seems that every few years, the reasons why people decide it is their right to other people's work changes (and it keeps moving to more and more industries).