meh, almost all the stuff I download I end up buying anyway so I don't feel terribly guilty.
Besides, some of the stuff I like is fairly obscure. If I hadn't downloaded it, I would never have known about it.
When the world comes full circle back to the early 1970s and awesome music becomes popular again, then maybe I'll stop downloading so much.
oh wait we're talking about gaming? my pc won't even run new games, so pirating is out of the question, except for old games which are impossible to find in stores anyway (and therefore as far as I'm concerned, I'm entirely justified in pirating them)
also re. environmentally friendly argument, if you're so concerned about the environment you could just play everything on Steam and Gametap and whatever game downloading services there are out there, no?
oh also pirating is useful for when you have a scratched cd or you lose your cd key or something stupid like that.