I think there’s a big difference between the things you pirate. If you’re pirating some very old books written by people that died a century ago, I don’t think it’s all that bad. If you’re pirating text books made by companies that will intentionally jumble the chapters and paragraphs around just so you can’t buy them second hand, piracy should be encouraged. If you’re pirating from a small independent author, I think piracy is only acceptable in very few situations.

I’ve pirated copies or books I bought because I couldn’t strip the DRM. I think that’s completely fair. Sure, I helped spread the torrent to a few other people in the process, but I just wanted to open the thing I bought on Linux without running a bunch of shady tools.