I was wondering when this question would pop up.

Long story short: piracy is a good evil. I will refrain from using the word necessary.

Piracy is the best competition and competition is always good. Whatever you are offering, pirates will offer the same thing at the same date as you for free. That should motivate people to make better offers not invest money in anti-piracy technology that is cracked usually on day one. Not to mention that "the internet has no borders" and you can't region restrict things or release them on a date in NA and then 3 days later RoW.

Please don't get me wrong. I don't advocate piracy and I wish that there wasn't any, but that at the same time I want the crackers to do their jobs and upload everything on day one. But I want it to have zero downloads. I want it to be there just as a reminder to publishers.

Piracy should be accepted only in 2 scenarios. The first one if the developer hasn't put out a demo and you want to see if you can run it / enjoy it. In this case it shouldn't be played for more than 30 minutes. The other scenario is when you actually bought the game and you somehow are unable to play it. Most common thing I'd imagine to be losing the CDs. Here's a personal example: I got a game given as a cover magazine (is that the correct word? given for free in the magazine, legally), which was not at the latest build and for some reason it couldn't be patched, stated so even in the magazine. The version had a few bugs, one of which was that a skill didn't work, one that I used. I paid for it, so I pirated the latest version which worked fine. Later I bought it again on steam.

Thanks xamon! Now if you don't mind I'm going to steal one entry.