Well, if you have read this far you might as well read my breakdown of this topic, hopefully someone will find this agreeable.
First off, coining people as 'piraters' is a large group and, from my own experience, inaccurate to say the least. Let me break the usual groups of piraters down into smaller groups.
First, you've got people who steal. These people pirate because they do it everywhere else in life. If they weren't stealing software, they'd be stealing car parts, or your wallet. Lets face it, anything can be stolen. Although, the risk involved with stealing software is a lot lower than most things.
Second, you've got people who have a passion for computers but no money backing them. This is due to the fact that computers are something that are a lot easier to get into at a younger age. Lets face it, most of the best computer users get involved with computers at like the age of 9-12. These people have absolutely no means of affording the tools they wish to learn and find it hard enough to trick their parents into buying them a 2,000 dollar computer, much less 5,000 more in software.
Third, you've got people who have bought software in the past but also warez when they deem a product not 'worthy' of its price tag. These are people that, if they couldn't pirate, still wouldn't buy your product. You arn't really losing money on them, no matter how you look at it.
Now lemme put down some info on different types of warez and why they arn't even all they are cracked up to be. Lets face it, for the most part it has gotten to the point where it is less painful and a lot more intelligent to buy what you want.
Mp3s? Low quality and often the ends of the songs are cut or you get jitters. Even with a perfect mp3 you still need to decompress them and burn them to a CD if you want any sort of backup/retention. We are talking a lot more time than just buying the CD in the first place.
DiVX/Other video rips? They take TONS of space on your hard drive and unless you like burning tons of CDs or have scsi raid mirroring, you will lose a lot of work with a disk crash. Plus, again, the quality is lower than a real DVD and you have the possibility of jitters or random spots of degredation. Much nicer to own the DVD to a show you really like than trying to download every episode in great quality then ripping them all to CDs.
Games? Games are the best use of warez IMO. Because the game community is starting to combat warez in the best manner. For the intelligent games what ends up happening is that you can warez the game and play it single player, but to go multiplayer you must buy it and get a key. So it ends up being a try before you buy type of deal. Granted I'm not saying warezing games is good, but I've just seen more instances where someone warezes a game and then ends up buying, then any other software.
Apps? No huge drawback from warezing an app aside from the occasional program that checks for illegal use.
I think in the end, I've learned that people who used to warez, but that now have full time jobs, are buying the software they need. But I also don't think a product not being worth its price is a good excuse for warez, because you can say a bmw isn't worth its price but that doesn't allow you to steal it. I know this will continue to happen, just because people can get it risk free. So, if you can understand this convaluted post, you may realize my end conclusion is that warez is a very mixed bag. I don't think it can be summarized in 1 line but I still realize and accept that it isn't right.
BTW:
Piracy is the buying/selling of illegal copies of software
Warez is the term for freely distributed illegal software
The difference is the fact that with piracy the intention is to make money off something you didn't make. I assume your original post, by its content, was about warez and not piracy.