These people don't deserve to suffer because they wanted to play a game. A lot of them are just dumb kids who don't have an understanding of value or the hard work put into these products. I bet they p[irate because noone has ever told them not to do it.
Backups of DVDs are useful: I've had a number of games end up with their DVDs damaged, tragically preventing me from playing them after paying £39.99 for a legitimate retail copy. I downloaded backup DVDs, burnt them to disc, and was able to resume play (with my own CD-KEY, of course) relatively quickly.
Steam is amazing for this - if something happens to your binaries, you just download them again and get to play in a couple of hours.
I think that piracy is such a problem, in many ways, because it's so easy to carry out. I'm not saying that people need to be policed and monitored online (although we're already watched, with companies purchasing information to sell us ads and who knows what else), but I'd bet that a lot of people don't even consider it much of a crime, for it's taking place on a computer; it's not tangibly real, is it? Breaking into a car or murdering someone involves a physical act of aggression and violence, whereas to pirate you just need to click a couple of times, like you would when downloading any sort of file!
It's further compounded by the notion that "well, I'm just one person, so what does it matter if I pirate one copy?" Unfortunately it's not just one person - it's thousands of people all choosing to break the law, and that leads to higher prices for games and reduces the chances of Rockstar producing another 'Grand Theft Auto'.
Consoles already seem like they're on their way out. Companies certainly expect to lose a percentage of profits to piracy, but as Ultratwinkie put it, there are millions of views on that site. That probably translates to several hundred-thousand unique visits and downloads (at least), and because a game can easily be copied to DVD and then distributed, I doubt all of those downloads will translate to just one copy - people will burn them and give them to their friends and family and so-on.
In order to combat piracy, I would suggest that game developers look further into practical encryption of game assets and so-on. Does anyone remember 'Rage' from Id Software? The game locked some of its content out if you didn't enter a real key. Half-Life and other games require CD-Keys, but these are eventually cracked by hackers, who reverse-engineer parts of the software to determine what sort of algorithms are used to create a key.
Use stronger encryption, and be smarter! People will still pirate the game, but if you make it unplayable without a proper key, then can anybody complain? I say that it's important that it work with a proper key because, as I mentioned, backups are often useful when a game's disc is damaged. Not for piracy purposes, but to replace a damaged copy.
I'd bet that it would be rather easy to encrypt game assets so that you end up with low-quality textures and models if your key isn't correct. These days, publishers seem to be into having an 'always-on' connection to a server that will verify whether your copy is genuine and then allow you access to multi-player and other features. But this does not always work.
Really, why aren't more powerful (and difficult to crack) encryption algorithms and other anti-piracy measures not used in games? Is it something to do with space on a DVD? Problems decoding textures and meshes in real-time? It almost seems entirely worth it, even if you can store less on the disc and need an extra few minutes to load and de-crypt your game assets, especially if it would prevent someone from pirating your game!
Any thoughts? I apologize for the length of this post...
