I found this cool article over on http://livingwithoutmicrosoft.org. It points to this interview of two Harvard economists. Its interesting to me that the discussion turned to piracy and how it actually helps Microsoft. One commenter saying "..if they stopped Chinese people using pirated copies of Windows, Linux would become the number 1 OS overnight."

I quite agree there. If people decided to be ethical about their computing Linux would become number 1 almost overnight. That's what happened to me. In my college days, when I was terribly cash strapped but hungry to learn about computers, I took 30 3.5" disks to Kinkos and I zipped the entire hard drive. I then took it all home and figured out how to manually reinstall all of the applications back onto my Windows 3.1 system at home. Thus I had MS Office, Word Pefect, Corel Draw, PageMaker, Lotus 123 etc... everything useful you could want or need.  

However, when it came down to thinking about my actions, it just didn't seem right. I eventually purchased all the software that I used. The experience of hand integrating all of that software ensured me of a great job in IT later on. But the feeling of stealing all that software also drove me straight into Linux. Buy 1997 I was using Redhat at home for all of my web server and access needs at home. I've never looked back and never felt better about ethical software usage. Its hard to steal from people that willingly give you everything they have no?