http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
It is LONG.
I read it for about an hour and a half : ).
But it made me delete the two unoriginal games I had on my hard drive (Swat 4 and UT3) and start saving money to buy them instead.
I also ordered Witcher EE even though I own the original version.Plus I am buying things from gog and steam..
Anyway, I agree with lots of points made in the article.Namely the one "DRM needs to get more userfriedly while being able to stop zero-day piracy".

http://www.tweakguides.com/Piracy_1.html
link is now hot.

Well, I've read the first two thirds of the article and I'll stop now. Mostly for the reason that this guy is playing with statistics and assumptions that I don't think can lead to any real result. He may have meant well, but as it stands now, the article looks like a mess to me. I've had some lessons about statistics and if there's one thing I've learned from it it's this: Interpreted statistics tell you a lot about the person who compiled it, but little about what's actually happening. I'm not even going to talk about all the legal stuff that he's interpreting to fit his intentions.
From what I've read so far, he seems a bit single minded about how PC gaming would be good without piracy. Question is then, why are people shifting to consoles then? It does make sense for the companies, but why the users? Well, mostly because console gaming works. That's the added value console companies are providing. Console games don't have compatibility issues. They don't have library dependencies. And they certainly don't have any intrusive DRM running all the time.
Some of you may remember my first thread about watermarks and so maybe you'll see that I'm not at all against DRM, but is has to play along with the rights we users have.
As he correctly states, in a legal vacuum, there is no copyright. The default state of immaterial goods is that they are in the public domain. Copyright is a limited monopoly we grant to manufacturers as an incentive to create immaterial goods for the common good. And as such, it can not be considered alone, without looking at the rights we give customers and the people in general. Rights like first sale doctrine. rights like PC tampering protection. If the manufacturers don't respect these rights, as they often do with DRM, how can we grant them these rights? Copyright is not a given. It's an understanding between two parties. The public and the users.
When one side decides to not uphold these rules (when there's not even any hint that I might be doing anything wrong), by tampering with my computer, scanning my applications, profiling my PC, sending personal identifiable information, blocking resale, blocking unwanted applications, blocking transfers to other devices and so on, how can we, the public still grant them that privilege?
Copy protections may be a necessary evil, but there has to be a balance. For example, an application can check for certain prerequisites all it wants while it is running (may that be an online license or a CD in drive), but when it is inactive, the right to use MY computer for these checks rests. Also, customers need to be informed of such actions (and no, I don't mean hidden in a 100 page EULA).
//Here starts my short rant that's not based on copyright, but more on how society works.
Lastly, the public has to have one right that's often forgotten. It has to have that right, otherwise copyright doesn't make sense: availability. When a work isn't published anymore and therefore doesn't generate any returns to the manufacturer, what good is it to the public to still protect the work from free distribution? (No, this isn't part of normal law, that's just something that I think is missing). None. Lawmakers really need to be reminded of why we actually have copyright.
The last point I want to make is this: There's money to be made from offering a service. If I can rent a game (license based DRM schemes are always rented, never bought) cheaper, because it has DRM, then I might consider this. If there's a version that limits the number of installs but in return doesn't require CD checks, it could be interesting to me. If I want to keep it forever, I won't mind aggressive CD checks. DRM actually has potential to make the user's live better, if used correctly.

Koroush is brillian and one of the few even-handed voices of reason on the net, where FUD is the norm. If he has something to say, you should listen, because it's virtually guaranteed to be free of pandering. He's a good writer.
His article on Vista is very good too, and I've used his guides (esp TGTC) for a long time.
I read this article and thought it was pretty good.

Very good article. Reminds me of why I stay away from piracy.

While I think he's pretty right on about many aspects in his article. I do disagree with this one particular statement:
That's bullshit. Once it's broken, usually the day of (or before) release it's up on the internet for anyone to get. How exactly has that slowed anyone down? Spore is the prime example for this. It's pirated before release and is one of the most pirated games of all time.
Casual copying is no longer:
1. Come to my house.
2. View awesome new game.
3. Get a copy.
4. Go home and install
Casual copying is more along the lines of:
1. Go to google, search for bittorrent client,
2. Download, install
3. Go to pirate bay and get your game.
The people who are pirating are not our parents, or even us 30 somethings, it's the younger generation who have had access to computer and the internet for a long time and know how to use both.
This incredibly naive attitude about casual pirates being luddites is going to hurt the industry even more.

Casual Piracy still exists, even if we want to ignore it. How many times has our non-tech-savvy sister asked us if they can borrow our external harddrive for a few hours to see if there's anything they like? Quite alot, actually.
The main take-away message is his point on the initial sales period.
Of course, non of these are issues GoG.com deals with... these are Good OLD Games. Precisely the kinds of things people on all sides of the issue agree can be "freed" from DRM. The initial sales period is gone, they're already widely available illegally. No harm in quietly, humbly monetizing the leftovers.
I especially liked his section on Steam. For now, I'm just gonna keep buying from GoG. I'm thinking Arx Fatalis, Disciples 2, UT and Descent 3 are next.
I just realized what you were talking about. You see, I have Linkification!

If Steam did not bloat the already excessive requirements of some games it would be almost perfect.

Hmm? I've found steam to be pretty stable, and 50ish MB of memory and a few extra CPU cycles a second seems like not much in the face the requirements for newer games.
Are there any benchmarks or tests showing an appreciable fps drop in Steam versions of games?
BTW Judas, what's the state of Thief on modern systems lately? Is that old widescreen and fov patch finally working?

I haven't personally tried running the old Thief games myself but I have heard that Vista requires several schools of magic including necromancy to run them. Thief 3 on the other hand runs pretty damn smooth on my machine (maybe because it's not the STeam version I don't know....may need to run a benchmark ). I have tried the L4D demo from Steam and that ran like a drunkard with a broken leg on my machine. Of course we could go into a debate on whether it's Steam or my machine causing the lag.

Piracy need not even be absent for that, if people don't all subscribe to the "why pay for it when I can get it for free" mindset.
Yeah, a bit too idealistic, but I'd say the mentality of gamers needs to shift in that direction anyway, one of rewarding high quality works instead of just purchasing goods of varied quality. Not entirely unrealistic, though, since as far as I know Radiohead's experiment with In Rainbows worked out pretty well for them.
This seems to neglect that it's actually an approximate piracy rate of 82%, which is quite a bit better than the 90-95% rates proposed by big-name publishers. Sure, that's still not exactly good - but no difference? Also, see Reflexive's 1000:1 pirate-to-customer conversion ratio on the effect of piracy on indie games.
What was it with Crysis, a PC only title - 86K in the US, 1 million worldwide, or something? Sticking to US data might not be a good idea - how about running with worldwide sales instead?
Also, it seems an odd oversight to not even mention the Nintendo DS in regards to piracy on consoles.
Overall, not a bad article, but not exactly as thorough as it should be.

Nobody said it didn't exist, it's just the way casual piracy is done these days has changed. It used to take some know-how to pirate, now it's not difficult at all. As for my non-existent non-tech-savvy sister? I wouldn't know. Aside from her being non-existent, I, like many other people I know don't have an external harddrive to pass around. And if people are going to trade CD images, they're likely getting images that were already illegally downloaded by someone. In fact I recall way back when I was a teenager and I would pirate stuff. It was rarely a copy of someones original disks (yeah, floppy disks, copying from 5.25" to 3.5" was a pain in the ass). It was usually already pirated, and already cracked. Games had just as much copy protection back then too. And some really tricky schemes at that.
He claims it stops casual copying in the initial release period. When, again, games like Spore get just raped before they're offically released. Not all of those pirates were/are tech savvy people. If 1 person is stopped from pirating because of the protection while 1000 people are successful in pirating, I'd hardly call it effective or successful. I certainly wouldn't say it's working.
This is why the pirates are laughing at the people thinking that DRM is even remotely affecting piracy rates (even in initial release amongst casual pirates). It's just not working. Game companies know this. They're more concerned about wiping out the 2nd hand market than dealing with the losing battle they're facing with piracy. Hell, even if I put on my tinfoil hat I'd go so far as saying that they even want piracy to stick around so they have a scapegoat for their attempts at wiping out a legitimate market or whatever scheme they can come up with to track players/make more money.

The other thing is that we are pretty much trained by now to just gt rid of DRM. Since everything is protected by layers and layers, many people go into auto-drive when encountering another one. iTunes... buy, strip DRM, convert. PC Game... install, patch, crack, launch. DVD ... rip, archive, convert. And so it goes on and on. Because these protections are so annoying, there is an amazingly big "customer" base for cracks, ripping software, DRM strippers and the like, and it's not just the pirates... it's actually pretty much everybody. Of course with such an incentive, the anti-drm software becomes more and more refined and easy to use and the only ones that suffer DRM issues are the ones who don't want to crack/rip/strip.

That article is really good. He makes a lot of great points (there's one or two small things that aren't correct, but he's still spot-on for everything else - he IS only human after all). A lot of what he says about the hype/FUD around Vista is what I've been saying for a very long time - especially the point that XP got the exact same punishment when it came out. I think the next time I see some moron spouting "VISTAS GFX R STEELING MY MEGUHURTZ!" I'll point them to this. That is, assuming they can read.

That is probably why he used the word "often" instead of "always".
In case of Bioshock, GTA4, Mass Effect and some other games the DRM, like it or not, WORKED to stop zero-day piracy. Sure, hardcore pirates patiently wait for a crack, but the nonhardcore ones might give in and buy the game instead.But I am just repeating what the article says anyway, so..