I like to add to that, that pirating a single game for instance doesn't exclude the pirate from purchasing said game.

The problem there is that there is just too much of it to be able to stop it, without grinding down to pure Internet censorshit. As soon as you manage to take down one, two other pop-up from nowhere.
One thing that I think can help a little at least for gaming, is that major game developers take their time to release finished products. It pisses me off to no end when a major developer/publisher releases a game so bugged that it's barely playable, or cuts a lot of content to reach a certain deadline (For example: KotOR 2 and probably GTA IV (PC) etc. Even though I liked the former, but the latter was a waste of money, both gameplay wise and technically).
And of course the draconic DRM-schemes, which we all have kept ranting on here without end.
But I think a lot of people here might find that quite obvious.
Slightly off-topic:
When I think about draconic DRM-schemes, then GOG I almost feel warm and fuzzy.
Also, we need italics, because I like them.
Indeed. I did so when I used to pirate games.

The idea that I have to beg someone to pretty please buy my stuff instead of stealing it is absurd. People will steal anything, it doesn't matter how consumer friendly or supported it is. The only way to stop people from stealing something is to make it hard to do so, and punishable when done. Thousands of years of history and human nature examples bear this out, only a fool believes pirating is caused by a lack of good product or services. People are just selfish jerks and don't care about others, nor are they smart enough to see long-term results of their actions like developers closing down or PC games being delayed or canceled, they just want stuff for free and they want it now.
It's not the same exact thing, no, but it is still theivery. Copyright infringement is what it is directly, not theft, but really on a common sense level it is stealing, as only semantics seperates the two.
Someone creates a product, like a videogame. They invested a certain large amount of money into the game and also many, many man hours. They therefore ask a price for access to their work, and pirates ignore that request and take the access for free. It is plan and clearly theft because you are taking something (access) that costs money without paying for it. Is there any better definition of theft than taking something which costs money without paying for it?
Yes, if you concentrate on the physical aspects of theft you can argue pointlessly that it is different, but this is a digital age... the Internet is a different beast, and theft need no longer be physical. Everyone seems to understand the Internet has changed the world until it comes time to acknowledge it has changed theft as well.
In short, I hope their appeals fail. I hope they spend their time in prison and I hope their website gets shut down. I also hope ALL file sharing websites are shut down, and that all pirates get what is coming to them. It's not censorship any more than stopping a Miscrosoft employee from taking the Windows 7 source code to Apple and selling it for millions would be censorship. The Internet is a "wild west" now and that needs to change.

Well, piracy IS a serious problem, especially on the PC. It's because of piracy we get these insane DRM-systems, and it's because of piracy that major, single-player PC-only releases from big, western studios are largely a thing of the past.
Nobody can deny that piracy is harming the PC-market. And though it's hard to come up with numbers that aren't complete bogus, it's obvious that it eats up a huge amount of potential revenue.
With piracy rates of around or over 80% (most recently, Stardock experienced this with the launch of Demigod), very few can argue that piracy aren't harming sales. It's impossible to know how many of the pirates would buy a game instead of pirating it if, somehow, piracy wasn't possible. But even a very conservative guess like 5% would make a serious difference on sales, and could turn a financial loss to a profit for a developer.
If piracy was made a lot more difficult than it is now, a huge number of people would either have to stop gaming, or buy (more) games. Some would stop gaming, sure, but I am guessing that most of them would want to continue. Gaming is fun, after all. Just imagine what kind of effect that would have on the PC-market...
I genuinely fear for the future of the PC. We'll get worse and worse DRM-schemes, we'll get less and less big budget single player games (and more horrid MMOs that are harder to pirate), and even the indies are leaving the platform for consoles. It's not all piracy's fault, but of all the different reasons, piracy is certainly the largest one.

Once, surfing the net I found this
http://www.pp-international.net/node/371
Seemed interesting to me. So why should I care about their "sales potentially lost" when all they care about is making money and creating insane DRM politics that harm only legal users instead of providing nice support and quality products.

Well that's an interesting perspective but I've pirated games that I didn't think were worth purchasing (for a number of reasons). In those cases, were it not possible for me to pirate I wouldn't have purchased them, I'd simply have gone without. You could argue that it would be better for me to have gone without but that's just crap artificial morality. It makes absolutely no difference to publishers if I've pirated the game or not if I had no intention of paying for it. Though I will admit torrents change this fact as I'm assisting others in piracy, but I don't torrent so that's irrelevant to the point I'm making.
The reason that the semantics are relevant in this discussion is that it's all to often assumed that piracy = lost sales. I would assume that the majority of piracy does NOT reflect lost sales. I think it's important to be aware of this as given the vast amount of piracy that's happening, it's ridiculous to assume that without torrent sites, these people would go and purchase the software. I just feel the discussion of piracy in general needs a dose of reality and less of the hyperbole that gets us nowhere.
That's an assumption. The reason for fewer blockbuster releases on the PC is that there is less chance of making money on them. Now whether this is primarily down to piracy or other factors is debatable. Perhaps consoles becoming more popular, more powerful and more like PC's has a larger effect on the dwindling sales on the PC. After all, buying a PC that is capable of playing the latest PS3 or X360 games costs a lot more than an X360 or PS3.
My point is, everyone rushes to jump on piracy as the cause of all our problems, I think that's just a blinkered way of looking at things.

Did you read my posts with links, reports and even a pretty picture?
If you did then yes I can deny and have loads of interesting facts (numbers, graphs, the whole lot) to substantiate that piracy is NOT harming the entire PC games industry.
The word harm means inflicting pain, pain to a market means loss of revenues, this loss of revenues should be made clear by providing sales figures, these sales figures compared to previous years should then see a decline in growth.
Then and only then would a harm to the pc industry seem a reality.
However this is not the case. Actually the reverse is the reality
Losses to sales are losses to retail sales which is not caused by piracy but by online subscription fees, online distribution and other innovative business models and to growth in the console market.
The future of PC gaming is bright. If you don't believe me, search out the facts then you probably should agree with me.
If however you disagree, I ask you to come up with figures for the worldwide pc gaming industry to substantiate your opinion.
If you succeed in that I will admit defeat and even give you 10 GOG games of your choice for your enlightenment.
Edit: changed the three games to five since I found out another fact to further prove my point
Edit2: Changed the five games to ten, because I finished cross referencing some of my sources and I just read a couple of projections made by analytical financial institutions

First off, you are not everyone else. Your actions aside, a huge portion of people who download games are doing so with no intent to pay for any of them, regardless of quality. If you deny this, you are naive.
As for your actions, if a game is not worth paying for I suggest you simply ignore it. Playing a game means it is worth something to you... maybe not $50 on release day, but perhaps $20 down the road, or $6 someday here on GOG. No matter whether you would have purchased the game anyway, you do not have the right to use someone's copyrighted material, the result of their money and time investment, for free. To do so, and to assert you have a right to do so, makes you sound like a spoiled child.
Your assumptions that the majorty are not lost sales are just that, assumptions. I could just easily type here the majority ARE lost sales, and my comment woud be no more or less accurate or relevent than yours.
At the end of the day, the point is that these people, and yourself, are violating copyright law, which exists for a purpose and is indeed essential in a capitalist system. Whether you personally would buy the product otherwise is unimportant, as the availability of a method to circumvent payment for copyrighted content is in itself damaging to the industry as a whole.
Furthermore, I find the idea that the end of all file sharing would have little impact on media sales completely absurd. Are all these pirates never going to play a game, listen to a song or watch a movie again if file sharing ends? Of course not, they will spend money on those things just like I do. Perhaps they will see less, play less and hear less... my heart breaks for them... but they will join in and be consumers like the rest of us. Those who pirate out of a political message foundation are very few and far between, and ever fewer of those would stand with their convictions and stay removed from consumerism if it meant never enjoying the results of the process.

I never said I had a "right" to do so, I simply said that suggesting it's wrong to pirate games that I had absolutely no intention of purchasing is artificial morality. It makes no difference to them whatsoever. You're quite right in saying I can't say everyone is like me, however what I'm questioning is to what degree piracy affects sales. I think it's absurd to take piracy figures and assume they all, or even a significant amount represent lost sales.
You say that if something is not worth paying for I should ignore it - but again, why? What difference does it make? If I'm being genuinely honest with myself and I know that I won't be purchasing something then it makes no difference whether I pirate it or not.
To give you an example, I purchased Mirror's Edge on the Xbox360 when it was released. When the PC game was released I downloaded it. There's no way I'd ever have bought it, as I already had a copy. This download represented *no* loss of sales for EA, so it was completely morally neutral.
That's a very specific example, but my point is that I think it's incorrect to suggest that all piracy harms the industry, we need to be a bit more scientific about our approach to the statistics in order to truly understand them - as Zhirek is being.
In your last paragraph you seem to be implying that pirates simply do not purchase media at all. In fact you're implying that they would be purchasing MORE than they currently are if they had no access to piracy. That's one opinion - I'm not saying it's completely invalid but there's an alternative and equally valid assessment. Pirates can and do buy media, they just pirate stuff in addition. Whether they would buy more if they were unable to pirate or continue buying the same stuff, I don't know. I'd assume neither do you - but it's a valid idea that should be considered.
It is an assumption of mine that the majority of pirated media do not represent lost sales, but that's my point. We don't know and I think it helps no one to constantly suggest that they do because the developers don't like that people are getting their product for free. My point is and always has been that we need to be clear about the stats before making decisions about the way things are going.
For the record, I download stuff very rarely. I *much* prefer buying things, particularly retail copies, it's just nicer. There are times when I simply refuse to because the product does not meet my standards (DRM stopped me buying the new Red Alert game, though I also didn't pirate it).

So, let's try to enlighten you.
First you attack Vurly Sejayjay (play on words, ignore if you don't get it) that he's naive, which is an unsubstantiated assumption you made.
And then you attack him on making an unsubstantiated assumption.
These are narcissistic features, did you know that, I am not saying you are, just that it's a narcissistic trait.
Can you provide me with figures which tells me exactly by simply reading the figures that in fact a HUGE portion, let's say 98 percent of the populace downloading games will never ever never ever buy a game out of the huge numbers that they have downloaded.
Oh and I also want those figures easily reproduced by any other analytical company without ties to the industry, just like they do with science.
If someone else can't reproduce your experiment then it has no scientific value.
Edit: changed Virly to Vurly, otherwise it didn't make sense at all.

With regards to any piracy claims, I would love to have some information about a country-by-country breakdown of piracy (surely possible in the internet age?) though I doubt it exists.
I used to live in a country where piracy was so rife, you could walk into a store and see badly remade boxes from photocopies on the shelves being sold. You could also go into some computer stores and buy disks to have various things copied onto them while you waited.
However, there was no legitimate market. The only way to get actual legal copies would have been by post (a very expensive process).
There was no internet connection though, as this was back in the late 80s, early 90s.
Without piracy, I would have had no access to PC games at all. (some may say that would have been a good thing!)
I didn't know any better, because it was just the way things were. No idea if anything has changed. I would imagine for large parts of the world, Africa, Middle East and Asia, thats the way it has always been.
So piracy of PC games has been going on since PC gaming started. You can claim it's easier now, but it was pretty damn easy twenty years ago, and there was no where near so much angst about it.

I'd give you that IF piracy was a new thing and only really existed large scale since broadband and flatrates became common. A friend of mine got CDs (including a nice installer and all) with a collection of rips delivered from the Netherlands on a monthly basis for a small subscription fee back in the 80s. I know that I - and most people I knew at school - pirated more than we bought. By a long stretch. Way more than we could have ever afforded buying, and I am sure that's still the case. Not every pirated movie/game/program/album would have been a sale.
(edit: hadn't read Andy_Panthro's post when replying. I am talking about Europe in my case. I.e. Piracy always has been a global thing.)
One of the big mistakes game publishers and developers still make, in my opinion, is to market games almost exclusively to the teen segment that a) has less income and b) less moral objections to stealing. We are at the point where there's a 2nd if not 3rd generation of gamers around. There's a huge untapped market here that ... well is not served or even considered, generally.
-Mnemon

The percentage of pirates who would otherwise purchase content is irrelevent. The impact of piracy on the industry is based not only on lost sales, which you must admit happens on some level, but also in the impact on investors, paying customers and others that seeing games pirated out the wazoo fail on a commercial level has.
If I were an investor who contributed money to Stardock and Gas Powered Games today, and I saw news stories about their game having dissapointing sales and also being pirated 6 to 1 with sales, I would say "why the hell am I investing in PC game development?" That line of thinking follows all the way to Wal-Mart asking why they stock PC games to Gas Powered Games asking why they develop primarily for the PC in the first place. Perhaps only 10% of those who pirated the game would have bought it otherwise... perhaps more... but the effect on the market is still felt beyond that.
Wow, how condescending. That's also a narcissistic trait by the way.
My statement was that some people steal just to get things for free... and a lot of pirates are those kinds of people. You can debate the percentages with me all you want, a small percentage or a large one, it makes no difference. Some pirates, a lot or a few, are people who just want free games and don't care about the reprecussions on others or themselves.
To deny that, yes, is naive.
On the second part, his assumptions are that piracy results in few lost sales... my assumption is it results in more lost sales. We are both assuming something because there is no data to show clearly one way or the other. My point was that his assumptions are no more factual than mine.
In short there is a massive difference between assuming pirates' effects on lost sales one way or another and denying the fundemental truth that some people are selfish prigs.

1. That's kind of a self fulfilling prophecy then isn't it. I'm saying lets not bullshit about piracy and how much it does or doesn't affect sales and be a bit more upfront about it. You say that because of investors and how they respond to the bullshit affects the industry. So maybe if there was more information about exactly how piracy affects sales there would be fewer poorly made decisions based on non-facts.
2. I never denied that there are pirates who just don't give a crap, I'm just questioning how much of an affect it has. Plus I don't think it's appropriate to declare piracy theft as it's factually inaccurate. You may feel that piracy is as bad as theft (I'd disagree, though that's not me saying that it's OK), but the fact is it's *not* theft.
3. You're right, it's all assumptions and that's what I have a problem with. It seems to be acceptable to say "piracy is bad, end of story" rather than thinking in more detail about how much of an affect it has and approaching it scientifically.
As has been said by an indie developer - developers shouldn't be trying to reduce piracy, they should try to INCREASE sales. If reducing piracy *does* increase sales then fine, go for it - but I don't think it's a very well researched area.
All this piracy = lost sales thing just smacks of "intuitive" reasoning which is quite often completely false.