arrrgh there's a lot of pirates still out there

When I first became interested in computers, one of the first things I did was begin downloading music through Napster. From there as I began to dig deeper into the inner workings of computers, I began to download pirated software. For those that don't know the modern use of the word pirating refers to the use of any media or technology without paying for the rights to it. For a long time I would stay up every night finding countless movies, music, and software to download. Sometimes I would never even use the media I downloaded, I would simply download it for the fun of it. I would amass all this media and software onto hard drives just so I would have it "in case I ever wanted to use it." I would use my family's computers like zombies in order to take advantage of their bandwidth when it wasn't being used. I was downloading gigabytes upon gigabytes of data every week. While some of the data was never touched, I did use a lot of it, and through it I learned a great deal about computers. Eventually anti-piracy laws were passed. I began to read stories of people being sued for millions of dollars just for downloading a few songs without paying for them. This eventually began to scare me. One day I began using Apple's Itunes software for my music and movies. I loved the ease of use and the convergence Apple had achieved across devices. From there on out, I began buying all my music through Itunes. I also began buying and renting the majority of my movies through Itunes. As I started college and began working more with enterprise computing environments, I lost touch with the pirating community. To the point that most of my accounts on torrent websites are now inactive. While I knew pirating was still very popular in some areas, I had somewhat assumed that it had declined in recent years. A recent article on Slashdot showed me I was very wrong. Antivirus company Avast recently revealed that a single license of it's software is being used by 774,651 users worldwide in over 200 countries after going viral on file-sharing sites. This shows how very popular pirating still is.