MacCentral's editor Peter Cohen has put up an article at MacCentral on piracy in the Mac games market, drawing on give-and-take from MacSoft's Peter Tamte, Aspyr Media's Michael Rogers and MacPlay's Mark Cottam.

The thrust of the article is poking holes in the arguments that pirates use to explain why they steal software, and explaining why all future MacSoft titles will have copy protection.

Perhaps the most potent debunking, though, is of the myth that by pirating Halo, Mac fans are striking a blow against Microsoft, who wooed Bungie with the offer of becoming the premier Xbox developer, effectively delaying the release of Halo on the Mac by more than two years:

"Microsoft only sees a small amount of the revenue generated by Halo," Tamte countered. "What you're doing instead of 'stealing from the man' is robbing the Mac community of future games. And someone, somewhere, did not get paid for the work they did to bring that game to you."

Which is not to say that if pirating Mac Halo did hurt Microsoft it would be right, but people at least should not be stealing and lying to themselves at the same time.