An obvious political construct meant to try and pressure lawmakers. Either that or it demonstrates how far the game industry is detached from reality. All arguements about whether or not a pirated copy amounts to a lost sale aside, simply the idea that there is 41 billion dollars in the global economy (which is slowly recovering from a recession) that would be spent on handheld video games is ridiculous.
What's more I suspect this is also meant as a multi-pronged attack. The industry has a lot of things on the table that they would like to see happen. Some of their big issues has been things like Abandonware, Emulation, and "fansubs" of games. All of which float on a careful legal line. With Abandonware companies are no longer selling a game and/or maintaining the nessicary liscences, when it comes to Emulation it generally allows you to play a game accross intended formats, it being legal if you already own the original version of the cartridge, then of course you have 'fan to fan' copies which are games that might be currently released, but not in your area, with no intention of them ever going there. A company can't claim to be losing money on something like that since they aren't willing to take your money and sell you a usable copy to begin with.
All of these things can be debated, and have been heavily. For the most part the industry tries to claim all of those things are "piracy", and for the most part the law has given mixed results and there haven't been any solid enough rulings to have these things actually declared illegal. On occasion when I've actually seen itemized lists of pirate sites (it happens very rarely, specifically because of the debate it can cause) names like "Home Of The Underdogs" and "Abandonia" oftentimes come up, despite those sites being entirely legal, and having on numerous occasions taken down games when they have gone back into distribution, or a liscence was renewed.
With Emulation, it can be a touchy subject because you have consumers that believe once they own a game, they own it, and it should be theirs forever. Then you have an industry that believes increasingly that they should have the right to re-tread the same stuff and make you pay for a new copy every hardware generation.
One of the conflicts I also remember about EULAs, was the idea of people's right to "mod" their programs and that right was upheld, which is why the modding community still continues to operate. While I believe there were rulings in both directions at various times, this has included the right of someone to make their game run on a differant set of hardware, which means that people doing things like modifying Gameboy Games to run with custom firmware on a Sony handheld, or on a PC is technically legal despite what the companies might decide. This is also why emulation sites operate publically and you can find massive dumpsites of ROMS from the Genesis/SNES/etc... although the legality is dependant on you owning or having owned the original cartridge.
A lot of the baaaawing being largely about the fact that emulation means that selling games for nostolgia purposes like the "Sonic's Genesis Collection" (which I own for PS-3) aren't a gold mine, and buying games like "Comix Zone" or "Gain Ground" off of Steam can only command a few bucks because your basically saving most of the people who would be interested in those a bit of time more than anything.
My point here being that when they talk about US piracy sites, I'd very much be questioning where they got THAT number from, and how many legal sites are being used to pad it out. As loud as portions of the industry might cry, sites like Abandonia haven't been shut down because here is no legal precedent to do so, and they play by the rules.
Basically I think they are hoping to try and say that they are losing big bucks from these kinds of sites, or at least that's what I'd imagine you'd see if you were to look into the fine details.
This is simply my opinions/observations.
Simply put they're probably crying because there are people who doubtlessly ported games like "Monster Hunter Freedom" or "Pokemon" to the PC or whatever so they could play them that way, which cut in on their action. Or decided to port their old genesis games or whatever to those formats which kind of shot them in the foot for re-selling old products.
I generally don't think messing around with this kind of stuff, is worth the time or effort. As much as I wish Sony *WOULD* release the Monster Hunter games for a format other than the PSP for example (so I can control with two thumsticks comfortably), it's not worth risking messing up a system to try and jury rig it (at least not to me).
Oh and being an old "Wizardry Fan" I'd also like to play "Class Of Heroes" on a big screen.
