Originally Posted by
Airlick
It's stealing whether you like it or not. It's not stealing physical property, no, and yes, the owners of the intellectual property likely don't lose anything by pirates stealing it. But just because you wouldn't have paid for it even if it wasn't "available" for free, doesn't mean you're not stealing. You didn't pay for access to the material, which you were required to do if you wanted to get it. It means you're stealing.
Whether it is harmful to the developers or not is a whole different question. It's pretty much proven that cracking down on pirates doesn't increase sales by noticeable margin, since the pirates are unlikely to pay for something regardless of the availability. Then you get examples like Witcher games that didn't really have any DRM to speak of and still sell like crazy, because people saw the game is worth it and wanted to support the developers.
Paying for games/movies is definitely the moral thing to do. I'd say pirating them can be excused in a few cases - if the game launches with a huge price tag and no free access so you can't check if you like it or not, as long as you do want to try it out and buy it eventually. Or if something just isn't available in your country. Last scenario, for me, would be pirating cash grabs like AC or CoD series, but then again, I simply don't play them because I hate them and the developers' policies. I can imagine pirating them just to stick it to Ubisoft or EA, though.