Just don't permit anything to connect to the Internets. Anything which tries to sneak itself onto the Internets is dodgy anyway.
And that's exactly what I'm afraid of, that it will insist on connecting, or won't start unless you connect or whatever other nasty tricks.
I never pirated games before. Not because I'm overly honest, but because I don't play many games, so the few I do play, I want to own copies. And also, because I am lousy at figuring out how to get them working once downloaded. And I hate always going, "Honey, can you do this for me?" to my husband, god knows he has better things to do than hold my hand through illegal software installation.
But, if I get Sims 3, it will be Arr'ed, after the intelligent folks figure out how to strip away the crap, and find a way to take out the "phone home" feature. It's not an economic thing, it's a common sense thing. Why should I pay to have my computer borked when I can get something for free that isn't borked? The non-borked part being much more important than the free part. If EAxis offered two versions of Sims3, one with all the phone home and securom crap, and one without, even though the one without would be more expensive (justified by saying, "hey, if you don't have securom, that means you have unlimited installs, so we have to charge more!") I'd buy it.