TomLikesGuitar said:
That's like saying, "What's the bigger problem, terrorism, or random airport searches?"
I can honestly say that, at least in the US and in my opinion, random airport searches (along with other similar security theater crap) are a much bigger problem. In the past ten years, a few thousand people have been directly affected by terrorism. "Becoming dead" is a pretty big side effect, and the effects caused by
that ripple outward from that somewhat to other people, but overall it's not really a huge number of people.
Searching people at the airport (and
frisking fondling groping them, and banning completely absurd mundane objects that couldn't be a credible threat in any practical way, and taking "nude" x-ray images of them, and harassing or even detaining people arbitrarily, and...) affects everyone who flies, though, which is a substantial portion of the population. I'd be surprised if fewer than half the people in the country have flown and had to deal with all that crap in the past ten years, and people who travel frequently have had to waste hours of their lives, if not days (cumulatively), having their privacy and other rights violated for negligible security benefit, if any...because almost none of it actually has any effect on "terrorists", only on innocent people trying to get from one place to another.
(Anyone who wants a more detailed explanation of how all those things have not only failed but often
can't even possibly work in theory can look at what Bruce Schneier [http://www.schneier.com/] has written about it, because he says it better than I could.)
Similarly, while piracy is generally a bad thing and causes legitimate and sometimes serious problems, many of the approaches used in an attempt to stop it are worse, in my opinion, because they're rarely effective at actually stopping anything (and frequently are cracked before the games are even released), and usually the only people they get in the way of or prevent from playing the games are the ones who bought legitimate copies.
There are some games out there that I've heard are awesome that I'll probably never find out about firsthand, because I'm not willing to put up with stuff like SecuROM or GFWL anymore, not to mention some of the other crap they've been pulling lately. Doesn't seem to do much to stop other people from being able to trivially download a cracked copy, though...
I'm all in favor of buying games, and over the past few decades I've accumulated a collection of a few hundred of them. Make something good, and I'm happy to pay for it. Include anti-customer software with it (which is what a lot of DRM ends up being, instead of anti-piracy, although I'll tolerate something like Steam, because it's minimally invasive and offers several genuine benefits to me), and you've just lost yourself a sale, though. There are so many other good games out there I could spend my money on instead, along with all the ones I already own and could replay, that I refuse to let them treat me like that.