I WAS one of those RAGING pirates in my teens and early twenties. I had 100's of thousands of dollars of pirated software stored and used on my computer. Interesting thing happened, as I played and learned much of that software, once I started working professionally, I got my company to purchase much of the stuff I was pirating at home while learning and playing with it - from upgrading their outdated office suite to purchasing Adobe Master Collection and so forth. So the way I see it, my illegal downloads were actually GAINED sales by the software industry If it wasn't for me pushing the company to get software I needed to do the job they hired me for, which I would have never gotten in a first place if I didn't spend years pirating and learning the aforementioned software they would have never spent thousands of dollars (and continue doing so) on new software now.