I agree with you, Adamantyr. I think people should respect the developer's wishes on these matters. I don't see it as much different than authors of books not wanting their works spread for free online. If they wanted that to happen, they could have released it into the public domain, under a CC license, etc. To me, it cheapens the CC-licensed stuff immensely if we lump it in with pirated stuff. It doesn't show respect to anyone involved.

For example, if you are using a FOSS version of a tool that isn't as good as the commercial version, you may be inspired to improve it yourself (and that is legal). That's the advantage; you can improve it and release it again for others to benefit from. On the other hand, if you don't know how or care to do that, you can buy the commercial product. I suppose you could also pay someone else to do it for you and keep it FOSS, but I haven't heard many stories of that happening; love to know more about that option, though.

One thing I do strongly feel, though, is that copyrights and patents ought to be limited in duration. I think 20 years is plenty long enough for either one of them. If a book is still selling 20 years later, that's great for the author, but 99.9% of books and articles don't last that long. They go out of print, and it gets increasingly hard to find them. This is ten times truer for software.

I think that a game or other piece of software should automatically enter the public domain if it hasn't been published in 20 years. If a publisher re-releases it (say, Sierra's collections), those pieces can stay commercial, but if it's something that hasn't been published in that period it should be free.