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When I am downloading a copyrighted book, movie, comic, album, etc. (and I get plenty of all of these) I do consider it some form of stealing and certainly rather illicit. It was pointed out that stealing a piece of digital media is a little than doing some analogous stealing of a physical or digital commodity of any preciousness. The upside of the the whole piracy thing is that it usually vastly increases the availability of media, and there's probably some saturation point where the increased exposure of a piece of media will coincide with a certain amount of legal purchases (though probably resulting in fewer overall sales than we've seen in the traditional market system, at least in the short term). I certainly think that piracy is bound to take money out of the pockets of some artists/creators, though there's also some amount of room for those people and their publishing entities to capitalize on digital distribution and strike a profitable balance.
Of course, there will always be people who will steal/pirate stuff as long as it's easily available and there aren't serious consequences for doing so. If you're going to pirate, you have to live with the fact that you're going to be screwing some people whose work you've enjoyed unless you make an effort to seek out and purchase their media or mail them a nice, big check.
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