I always was opposed against software piracy. Since I was a teenager:
Although I didn't get much pocket money, I always
bought my computer games. I simply thought this would just be fair. I only knew BASIC, and thought it would be an immense amount of work to create commercial computer games, because I wasn't even able to image how they did it :)
I couldn't afford much of those games because I always bought them, so I quickly started to learn Delphi, began to write my own games and sold them as shareware. So I was able to afford a lot more games and it made me a better programmer :)
Recently, a new chapter of my relationship with software pirates began:
Some weeks ago I noticed that the orders of a
software I developed nearly dropped
down to zero. Summer holidays - I thought. But strangley, email support requests and downloads for this software started to increase. Curiously, I googled a bit and found that that piece of software was now available 'for free' on several cracker websites.
Yipee. So basically, some stupid teenagers with too much time and no honor are able to ruin your whole work. I don't know yet what my next steps will be, but at least I'm not depending on these software sales. But of course this is really bad. And quite interesting that even companies seem to prefer using cracked versions of software than spending some very few bucks to use their software legally.
[/rant mode off]