/applaud
No, seriously.
Say what you will, but the engineering costs of developing software, especially with today's technology, are incredibly high. Sure, I hate having to pay the money for a new copy of "XYZ", but, as both a PLC programmer, and also a programmer for all kinds of other things (little applications, communications drivers, database systems, etc) I know that if you want quality, it's important to keep the developers eating.
I even pay for shareware IF IT IS USEFUL (Note: I have never paid for WinZip, though I probably should, but I have a few dozen licensed copies of PKZip which I prefer).
The thing most striking about that article though, is that the [cough]'Distributor' wasn't selling his illicit 'warez' through a .ru website.