Yeah, I think software piracy was a huge part of technological learning for me from an early age, figuring out how to the name of what I was even looking for (cracks, Warez), using astalavista, early torrent clients, forwarding ports, finding good torrents, using a firewall to block applications, applying cracks, learning about loaders, key generators, patches, protectors, and later reverse engineering and cracking software myself... staring at assembly in IDA for a few days straight so you can do something no one else online has done is a pretty interesting experience and probably one of the most formative ones to my enjoyment of computing.