Yeah, well. In my case, I've been hit by copyright holders, my ISP and even lj. I'm clearly not opposed to downloading, although my actual stance on it is more complicated than pirating=awesome.

I did a post a while back, on the Radiohead thing, where I pointed out that justifying piracy on the basis of the copyrighted material being too expensive is ridiculous. And that if they make it easy for you to pay them, and to pay a fair price, you should. Not because it's the law, but because under capitalism, labour needs to be exchanged for something, or else there's little point in labouring, you know? Pay the artists or they won't be able to be artists full time.

imho the best way to justify illegal downloads is to critique the whole copyright/ip regime. And whoa, tangent, much?