Has piracy really ever been a crippling problem for any business?
97% of players played the cracked game that the publisher seeded on purpose via piratebay and other trackers.
They thousands of forum posts after this because pirates weren't able to realize that this was a copy protection mechanism.
So yeah, I'd argue that piracy is a huge problem.
Where I live (Mexico) I know so many people that have pirated Adobe, Microsoft apps and plenty of games, who there is NO WAY they would have bought the software if they hadn't been able to pirate it.