And up until recently, I've justified it and worked around it, and in the end, I've come to the conclusion it's very close to stealing.
I know all the arguments against it, as I said, that's how I used to justify it, but like, the only difference between you downloading a ROM and you shoplifting a game is that you aren't stealing the hardware, which honestly, usually doesn't top $5.
Just a technical point: Any notion that downloading copied software or other media is stealing (or even piracy) is rhetoric. That's not to say that it isn't illegal, of course, but "Infringement of Intellectual Property Rights" isn't as likely to play on people's sense of guilt as the words piracy and theft are intended to.
Piracy is a crime of violence to seize properties, especially ships of the government.
Stealing, in a literal legal sense, requires
conversion; you need to remove something from another person's posession. Internet piracy is not removing something from them (not even money); it is simply preventing them from obtaining something.
And in fact, each game downloaded does not necessarily mean they've lost the price of the sale of one game; there is an implicit assumption within that that the person would have bought the game if it was not available to download, which is not necessarily the case. In some cases, people download games that they wouldn't otherwise consider worth the purchase price. In others, people download games that are no longer on sale.
One of my big interests in my law studies is Intellectual Property, although I haven't taken the courses on it yet. I think in the fields of end-user software home consumption, the economic model the media companies are fighting so hard to defend will fail, just like VCR recording of television shows is now so commonplace that even though notionally illegal, it's entirely unenforced.
I think the real solution is not going to be prosecution (since it's too hard to prove in many cases, and you don't have the funding to prosecute every single person who does it on a case-by-case basis), but a rethink about the way we sell copiable, intangible goods. I don't believe in all that ideas-should-be-free bullshit, because without some kind of protection for intellectual property, noone will innovate in technology or entertainment. But the current system will not do the job it is intended to.
There was an interesting quote I read once from a US Fed Court judge in the 40s. I can't remember the exact words or source, but he said it is not the role of the courts to protect profit-margins from the realities of the marketplace. If you can't provide your product at a price the market is willing to pay, then the reaction lies with you, not with the law. Subsequently, of course, big business has got into the ear of governments and we have all the anti-piracy legislation we have today.
