Hmm... I have to admit I am a bit black and white-ish on this issue but I still do it anyway. It does feel wrong to me, regardless that it's this little thing or that. Like stealing a penny from someone would still feel wrong regardless that the person probably won't need it or care. The simple act of doing something I know it's illegal makes me feel like it's wrong, regardless that it affects the publisher or not. If it's an upbringing or personality trait, I don't know, it just feels that way.
If I actually made real money out of Illustrator and photoshop on my machine, I would buy them, since then it'd be an investment and not just software for the ocasional on the side thing or the retouching of this or that picture. I do pay for software I can afford though. I'd really like to go legal on Windows too, but it's just out of my budget.
Pirating Win95 doesn't really affect Microsoft so I can see your point quite clearly, but I guess we just have different moral compasses. In my eyes, the truly moral thing to do would be NOT to download the thing and suffer your inability to do whatever it was you'd do with it, but that would be very impractical, so I'd end up downloading it anyway even if it felt wrong.

Fair enough. I think I used to have that sort of attitude, but in recent years I've found myself re-evaluating my morality. It's actually something I think about quite a lot, as a result I've ditched certain moral ideals as I've come to think of them as baseless. To use an extreme example, some people consider homosexuality morally incorrect. I expect a lot of them just feel it's wrong, others may have more explicit reasons. When you actually give it some serious thought it's hard not to realise that there's no logical basis to thinking homosexuality is immoral, and so probably best to ditch that idea.
That's the way I try to keep my morality, based on logic alone. In fact, one of my pet-hates of late is what I like to call artificial morality. Morality that has no bearing on the real world, and seems to exist for morality's sake, without actually affecting, one way or another, our interactions with other people.
As you can imagine, I don't see anything wrong with that at all.

I personally see no ethical problem with this matter. But then I'm also a copyright minimalist who thinks that anything older than 10 years should be in the public domain.

One thing that often gets forgotten though is that these days "downloading" often means Bittorrent. And bittorrent means you are also uploading.
Is it morally ok to download that episode you missed? Maybe. Is it ok to upload it to loads of other people? Or is it ok to download it without sharing it to others? Who knows.
Although it's risky to compare virtual copies with physical ones, how about this one. If someone throws out a pile of stuff and leaves it for the garbage man, is it ok to take that?
I could kind of see win95 being analogous to that... sort of.

I think in any torrent client you can restrict your torrent to download-only.... :|

BitTorrent is designed to assign packet priority based on how much you upload. So though you CAN do that, it will slow down your download considerably, because people who are uploading will get packets that you might have gotten.

No, it doesn't. My point is, the copyright owner is the only one that can bring charges to enforce the copyright. So for practical purposes, if they are not enforcing it, nobody is.
Does that make it legal? In a theoretical sense, no. In a practical sense, it might as well be. With the exception of simply feeling bad that you've broken "the law", there is no practical difference.

Isn't that just committing a crime on the (admittedly good) assumption that you'll never be caught?

I think it's more like committing a crime with someone being well aware that you're committing the crime, but they don't really care.

Less sneaky crime and more anarchy & looting then?

Pretty much.

I'd equate it to swimming in your neighbor's swimming pool while he's on vacation. You didn't actually take anything from him, and he might not care even if he notices. But you didn't actually get permission either.

That's why I always fill my pool up with piranhas when I go on vacation.

LMAO :p
That would be the equivalent of hiring a team of rabid lawyers to protect software you don't sell anymore.

*Steps away from ceemdee's pool and quickly runs towards the nearest Taco Cabbana. NACHOS!!!* Wow, your poor neighborhood kids who try that... LOL