Apart from installing software to see if it even runs and then promptly removing it, there are no even vaguely legitimate excuses for software piracy - the fear of being stuck with a product you cannot return that doesn't work on your rig is something we should be allaying with a demo, but when companies do not release one then I am not going to tongue-lash someone for engaging in copyright violation if it's for that purpose and that purpose only. Anything else just makes you a douchebag.
[small]Note that if you have purchased software and THEN take steps to break copyright protection/strip out DRM, I have absolutely no problem with that and I do so myself in flagrant violation of the EULA - publishers can suck it, I bought their damn products so I see no reason to suffer through the extraneous and annoying bits they tack on in an entirely futile attempt to keep grubby pirates out.[/small]
Now music piracy, I tend to view that differently, as the nature of the medium is different - music is a service for one thing, and one you can legally appreciate for free; you can listen to a bewildering array of music without paying a cent for it or breaking any laws. Seen in that light, downloading an album you weren't ever going to buy is only worse than say... listening to it via a streaming radio site in the sense that the artists/labels get performance fees from those sites when their songs plays on them, which they don't from your unauthorized digital reproduction; otherwise all you've changed is the context in which you are enjoying their work for free.
In point of fact, depending on their contracts bands might very well be getting a pittance at best from album sales, relying on touring and sale of merchandise for all their real revenue, so the widespread unauthorized digital distribution of their albums may actually be beneficial to them - it's essentially free publicity, which is why quite a few artists have gone on the record to say they think filesharing is great: it introduces a much broader audience to those artists' work and increases the likelihood that some of them will then go on to purchase the things that actually make an artist/band money. With software, the product that makes developers/publishers money is the one you just downloaded without compensating them for, so that argument doesn't really fly.
Now me, I buy a bloody ton of music anyways[footnote]There was a stretch a few months back where I was laying out a couple hundred dollars each month at a minimum; last month I was fortunate enough to spend only $58 dollars or so for the 14 albums I acquired thanks to sales, whee![/footnote] and if an album is readily available via digital distribution for a reasonable price then I'm not even going to think of pirating it. If there's no legal digital copy though and the album in question is an obscure European import that will set me back $40 or more[footnote]Those aware of my musical proclativities know that this essentially describes 98% of the contemporary music I'd be looking to purchase.[/footnote], then I don't even feel remotely bad about nabbing it through extra-legal channels - there was no way in hell I was paying that much for an album so its not like they really lost a sale, and "musical evangelism" is kind of my hobby, so they're absolutely getting a ton of free publicity out of me whether I buy an album or not.
