I'm going to laugh very hard if the RIAA (and sister international agencies) has us all investigated. (But I'm up here in Canada and therefore a little bit farther away. Hahaha.)
There's nothing wrong with piracy (not morally, anyway). If I like software, I'm willing to pay for it. If I don't like it, I don't use it, so it doesn't matter anyway.
I don't use as much pirated software as I could; I tend to go for open source equivalents (e.g. the GIMP instead of Photoshop) where they exist and are possible...
Let me tell you the one positive aspect about corruption: laws nobody cares about are not enforced.
We have copyright laws here, but unlike the US, which has big music and film industries, there are almost no producing firms here, and the ones that do exist are too small anyway. There are no such ridiculous things as an MPAA or RIAA, and of course no person has ever been sued for millions of dollars for downloading a few songs. Talk about disproportionate retribution.
The result is that copyright laws are simply not enforced. To name one example, there's a bazaar on a park in the city (Parque Rivadavia, in case you were wondering). Its original purpose was the trading and swapping of used books and other printed material, but in the last few (I imagine somewhere between 10 and 15) years a few stalls have opened where you can buy pirated CDs and DVDs right off the street. The place isn't in a high crime area or anything like that and it's not like it's a secret. Everyone knows about it.
But to answer the question, yes, but it has been declining with time. There comes a time when you become too lazy to find cracks, test inside a VM (as compromising the system is not an option), and waste bandwidth on stupid shit.
Now, movies and music are a different subject.
The only time I have used an illegal copy of commercial grade software is for learning purposes. For example a few years ago before I purchased my copy of Maya I was studying using a free learning edition which I downloaded from the autodesk website. I then purchased a book to study with... my laptop crashed and I lost my free edition so I go to download a new one to find out they no longer offer it... now all the books for the version were specifically created to be used with the Maya learning edition and at the time I wasn't about to fork over big bucks for a full copy. So essentially every one of those books published are now completely worthless and of course they would not refund my money :). So in defiance I acquired a cracked version and continued my studies until I decided it was the right tool for the job and then purchased it. I did the same thing back in the Macromedia glory days with their MX suite and the same with Adobe's CS suite.
I personally see nothing wrong with it in such scenarios, but the moment you start to turn a profit on it I feel you should purchase a legit copy.
All the convenience stores where I live (and this is in an up scale area) sell pirated movies. In fact they attempt to upsell you if you're there just to buy a snack. The cds are stacked up in front of the register and they inform you when they have "new releases." I've even seen them do it with cops lol.
Well, the first time I ever pirated anything was a game that I had bought. I lost the product key and the company refused to give me another one, so I downloaded the game instead. Their fault for being retarted and refusing to give product keys to paying customers.
Even now I'm downloading something to do with offices and the year 2007 and accessing things. I need to do my ICT coursework, after all, and the version of Office 2007 I have doesn't come with Access. :)
I also tend to download game OSTs, but most of the games that have music I like are from Sega and [S]NES/N64 games...
Then again I have taken a liking to the L4D OST... :)
I use pirated excel. I wouldn't be still be using it if I didn't write my first math algorithms on it - I have not yet rewritten everything I did in Visual Basic for Excel in C++.
In other words: first the big companies choose not to protect their software (although they can), so you can get used to it. You lose your time to teach yourself to it, instead of some free equivalent. Then they suddenly declare you a "pirate". I have not killed or robbed anybody yet, especially on a ship.
I got offered recently to use a cracked version of a LaTeX editor, WinEdit. Why should I, when there are like 10 free ones, at least two of which being super good (the best one on Windows :( the second best cross-platform)?
Speaking of free programs, which are the important programs you use that have no free equivalent? (Games, ... which others?)