Yes but because you didn't buy it studios will claim sales are down due to piracy. This will cause even worse DRM to be created.
If anything the best thing about piracy is to show studio that DRM is pointless and doesn't work. Do you know the 7 out of the top 10 most downloaded games for 2009 were "protected" by SecuRom?
Companies waste money on copy projetection that will always be circumvented. They make the experience worse for legitimate users. Money spent on copy protection is money that could be spent on development or simply saved.
Think about the giant scam SecuRom, SafeDisc, and all those other "protection" companies run

If you look at the history of copyright it has always invariably been used to supress ideas and freedom of action.
That is why in modern copyright we have the concept of free use. Just because you created something doesn't mean that I the consumer don't have my own legal (and ethical) rights, and similarly, that society doesn't have it's own set of rights

Actually it's excactly other way around as before advent of copy protections there simply was no need for cracks as you could simply copy the software outright. First crack was developed for to break first copy protection obviously.
Copy protections came to be as developers/publishers (futile) attempt to stop or at least limit piracy. Lately they've also developed DRM to prevent resale of games (highly controversial and imo illegal as consumer law at least in my country quarantees the right of resale).

CDkeys actually aren't DRM, nobody specifically has the right to "play a game without typing in some numbers" The majority countries have 4 basic software rights:
A)The ability to resell
B)The ability to install on every/any PC they own as many times as they want
C)The ability to make backups
D)The ability to modify the files if they need to in order to get it to work properly for them
CDkeys don't actually manage any of those rights, as such they are not DRM, especially seeing as you are legally allowed to bypass it if you legitimately own the software it is on.

However, in the popular parlance, anything designed to protect a game, either from copying or from unlicensed use, is now considered DRM. That may not be accurate to the precise definition of DRM, but people would rather not have to differentiate between the two things they just don't like equally and for the same reasons.

Heh heh... that way of putting it made me smile.
Thanks for getting the job done, GOG! You know, what really matters is that I can play my good old games. ;)

A true word. May I remind people of the disaster that was the PC release of Grand Theft Auto IV?
Before release: Developer/publisher actuall brags about having spent $300,000 for copy protection
Before release: Developer/publisher embarrasses themselves by claiming the DRM they purchased is "uncrackable".
Around release: Fully working crack appears within less than 48 hours after release.
After release: Buyers of the game are enraged because it is buggy as hell, runs too slow, and in some countries fails to even boot on ~50% of the systems.
Who, at that point, didn't think about what state the game might have been released in were those $300'000 spent on quality assurance instead of throwing them out the window?
Publishers really just don't realise what bad they are doing. And many (technically less knowledgeable) customers don't know what they're being served. Look at Ubisoft trying to explain to loyal customers why they can't play their shiny new games when some far-off server is down. Ask people who wanted to watch Avatar, but couldn't because the theatre couldn't exchange DRM keys with the studio, how they enjoyed their evening. Ask all the customers who purchased huge collections of music (like most people not knowing any better about DRM and stuff) at Yahoo or MSN, and suddenly found that the hundreds of dollars they spent on music they thought they purchased, suddenly all went away because someone pulled a plug somewhere (and the same is going to happen to all online-activated games sooner or later).
The problem is that like in most businesses today, it's all about short-term profit and shareholder value. (And look where it got us). They forget about what it's worth to make your customer feel respected. They're screwing them over and over again, and then they're surprised when they stop blindly buying their products. The business, like many others, is sick. And those companies who are sick will just have to die out.
As for the copyright laws, they truly are a perversion of what they were originally set out to be. This has happened through constant hard lobbying by large media conglomerates, most notably the Walt Disney corporation. Much like patent laws, they have stopped being a protection of the artist and inventor a long, long time ago. Today, they are only tools for the big monopolys to oppress and keep under control the creative individuals and smaller teams. Ask any inventor (vs. large companies) what he thinks of patents. It's the biggest hurdle between their idea and ever seeing any money from it.

i'm not going to read this long-ass thread, but i'll throw some snap opinions in here:
if gog is charging people for the game and not giving it away for free, what could possibly be wrong about this? especially if the devs are ok with it.

The Codex's complaint is that the cracking team isn't given any credit for making this fix, which they consider "unethical" (which is iroinic coming from a bunch of morally bankrupt people; they care more about the "rights" of the cracking team than about the rights of the developer and publisher).
That's honestly all it is about. It's really no big deal except for those trying to "fight da powah" (in this case the "powah" being GOG re-releases leading to the games being "wrongfully" removed from abandonware sites).

Haha, yeah, I find that standpoint amusing. Especially considering that GOG is exactly what all these Abandonware sites have been asking for forever. While of course it is still technically wrong what they are doing, you will read on any decent Abandonware site that they only distribute the games because they are no longer available anywhere else. To most of the Abandonware scene, the guys behind GOG are heroes for being the first to actually do what everyone asked for. The whiners are just a bunch of kids who are too cheap to pay half a meal's worth for a game they so desperately want to play.

There was no need for a crack, and yet people made freely copies to distribute illegally (which is, for a developer at the time (when publishing companies were small) the worst that could happen).
Most of the peoples I know crack their games and their main excuse is that they don't have the money to buy these games. And believe me, the more I see this, the more I think that their reasons for pushing DRM (even if the DRM itself is problematic) is justified.

Cracking and piracy are two different actions, yet related. The first is to get rid of various protections (I almost always often do that for games I bought, so I won't have to leave the disc in the drive, though I prefer buying the disc and box whenever possible rather than just a downloaded file because I like having something tangible), the second is to get the software without paying. Nowadays the latter often requires the former as both software and other digital media is protected in different ways, but the former in no way requires the latter.
Of course, if software hadn't been copied to such a great extent protections wouldn't have become needed, and if protections hadn't been developed cracks wouldn't be either (because there would be nothing to crack).

DRM is punishing legit customers, not pirates.
Any retailer can tell you you have to keep your customers satisfied in order to keep them.
Treat them as kings and queens, not as potential criminals.
Shops protect themselves against shoplifters without harassing innocent customers.
Most people simply download an ISO containing a crack.
I see no harm in applying a crack on a game I legally purchased.
Copy protections like disc checks were initially made for only 1 reason, namely to prevent copying.
Back in those days downloading wasn't the problem it was today, but homemade copies for friends and illegal series like Twilight were.
Nowadays it's easier to download an ISO than it is to copy a game, so people download.
Keep in mind that not every download would have been a sale.
I'm not justifying piracy, but when I was younger and didn't a lot of money to spend, I bought some games and pirated others.
Nowadays I can buy the games I want and do so.
I know more people my generation (34) do so.
Most games I buy I buy on this site.

Completely debatable. No point in saying so without proof.

The only debatable part is exactly how many of those "pirates" would actually buy the game. Without question, at least some of those "pirates" are people who would otherwise buy a game if it weren't for DRM, region restrictions and the like (those mythical "lost sales" the game companies like to talk about).