"Morality, like art, means drawing a line someplace." -Oscar Wild
Thing is, copyright infringement is easy, helps people communicate, and is an established social norm. Whether you think it's right or wrong at this point, really doesn't mean anything.
Even if it did though, ask yourself this: why would you choose an infinitely & privately reproducible medium to create something, if you wish to get paid per copy? That's very much like internet debates: even if you get paid, you're still retarded.
Nobody ever gave you any reason to think you'd automatically deserve, much less be paid for any & everything you do.
- No, I'm not suggesting commercial games shouldn't exist. But if you plan on making a living selling copies of something infinitely reproducible to people, you'll only sell copies to those who choose to pay for the privilege of not having to do the reproducing themselves. That's me, and possibly you too. But it isn't a whole hell of a lot of other people.

Sure, DRM is a sound idea in principal but obviously we all know the faults. It doesn't prevent piracy and it ends up making an inferior product to the one that can be pirated. Hypothetical *perfect* DRM would close the gap between intellectual and physical property, but I don't see that being workable for quite some time, if ever.

Yeah, but, effectually I was calling Disconnected a "dirty commie." or at least that was my goal, on a board where DRM is outlawed, calling someone "pro DRM" is supposed to be like "He's the enemy boys, get 'em!"
whatever happened to people behaving themselves? GOG puts out DRM free files, and this dude is all "they shouldn't."

And that's bad too. Life just isn't fair, is it?
Problem is, if you're in it for the money, you need to give potential customers some sort of incentive to become customers.
Right now selling PC games really is like selling sand in Sahara. And the more DRM publishers tack on to their stuff, the less value their sand has compared to the free sand. Even something as wholly benign as Impulse is enough to turn off certain potential customers.
One solution I see, is developers/publishers morphing to subscription-based game-streaming services instead of publishers: offer a catalogue and the choice to stream & play a couple of games from it, in return for a monthly fee. That's taking your sand-selling stand and moving it out of Sahara.
Another is to do what GOG & Impulse does: offer better ease of use and support than illegit copies offer, price the games cheaply and hope people will choose to pay because they want the extra service. That's increasing the value of your sand over the value of the free sand.
I'd much prefer the latter, but I'm quite certain I'd be keener on the former if I made games for a living.
EDIT: Sorry Weclock I think you misunderstood me. Hopefully this clarifies it a bit.

All of this seems to hinge on the assumption that the PC Gaming industry is in turmoil, though there has been evidence shown on threads here that actually it's steadily growing. Masses of piracy does not inherently mean masses of lost sales. I shall stop flogging that particular dead horse. For now... :)

Not exactly. It hinges on the assumption that exclusive control/distribution is the road to maximum profit. Unless you happen to have compelling evidence to suggest that piracy results in zero net lost sales, then it's hard to argue with that assumption.
Growth notwithstanding, unless you can produce that evidence, you're essentially saying that various businesses shouldn't try to make as much money as they possibly can. For a lot of them, that would actually be illegal.

Well the alternative is to continue as they have been going with retail and digital sales, though without the DRM (given that I question whether it results in more profit). If the evidence shows that the PC gaming market is actually growing as it stands, perhaps radical new ideas aren't needed beyond suggesting that piracy is not causing the detrimental affect that everyone thinks it is. Even if piracy does result in a net loss of sales, it may be detrimental to business to come up with new business models as it's entirely possible that they will fail miserably as DRM seems to be doing.
The evidence may indeed show that the best way to continue making money in this industry is to just carry on as normal. I agree that trying to make your product more appealing is always a good thing though. GOG.com is a prime example, I could of course pirate whatever they do but the service they offer is worth what it costs. When Spore (the poster child for crap business decisions) was released, they were in the unfortunate situation of selling a product inferior to the pirated copy. Clearly a stupid thing to do.
Basically, the point of this rambling and nonsensical post is that if the evidence shows that the PC gaming industry ain't broke - why fix it? I'm not sure that statistics like over 100k pirated copies of Demigod vs 18k sales is significant evidence either way.

Businesses exist to make money. If a business has reason to assume it can make more money that it otherwise would, if only it can control distribution of whatever it is producing, then that's what it will do.
That the currently popular types of DRM are useless at asserting control of the products, and also scare away potential costumers, doesn't invalidate the above. It just means businesses got suckered by SecuRom & their ilk.
But that's just it. As long as businesses are convinced that gaining exclusive control of their product would result in more sales, they'll also be convinced they aren't making as much money as they could when they don't have that control. And thus they'll try whatever they can to gain that control.
If they manage to piss off hordes of customers while sorting out how to do it, then chances are smaller businesses will go the opposite route, at least until the large ones find something that does work. The smaller ones will do so, because it's a golden opportunity to snag up pissed off customers and positive PR.
Because businesses aren't in it to make a little money, they're in it to make as much money as they possibly can without breaking the law.
I don't disagree with you at all. I'd love if the world was a nicer place where people didn't pirate shit and businesses were in it to make a small profit, rather than trying to earn every last cent in the world. But that's not this world.

You make absolutely valid points. The fault lies with the game publishers, of course. If they think they can control distribution of their products, then they're naive as hell. More likely, it's something they do to placate shareholders. I can't imagine that so many companies are run by complete idiots, so I think it's a case of simple subterfuge.

Great points all around. I especially like the analogy of "sand in the Sahara". One thing the game publishers have to remember (and the music publishers and movie etc) is that we don't truly *need* their products. They are entertainment. DRM, as had been mentioned, effectively decreases the value of your product. If you can force your customers to pay for it anyways, good for you I suppose, but others are just not going to bother spending good money on an effectively broken product. Much the reason why I bought Sins of a Solar Empire instead of Mass Effect. They were on the shelf near each other, both games sounded good, I'm sure I would've enjoyed either one, but I didn't want to deal with any hassle from SecuROM.

I appreciate all the stuff you're saying and I don't disagree with any of your points, all I'm saying is I think they evidence might show that they're getting it horribly horribly wrong. I'm anything but an idealist and I think if they were to be pragmatic about it they could continue earning money. All this effort to make more seems to be counter-productive and resulting in bad PR and reduced sales.
Basically what I'm saying is not "this is how I'd like the industry to be" but "this is how it would be most successful" - it just so happens that I think it would be most successful by treating their customers decently and providing a product that people actually want to buy - it's a loony idea but it just might work!

In light of the new developpments regarding the judge's associations, perhaps people protesting about the outcome of this trial have a point ?
I'm pretty sure someone already mentioned that using money and politics to influence the outcome of a trial it's wrong.

You mean that giant flashing Conflict Of Interest sign that the judge was seen posing in front of whilst wearing a "Copyright FTW!" Tshirt?

That, and the classy cologne of corruption and backstage political games he was wearing at the time.
It seems that all of that wasn't enough for him to sit this one out.
Amazing that from all the judges in Sweden, this one got picked for this trial.
I'm a firm believer in coincidences now, i can tell you that.
I really wonder about who deserves to wear the bandana and eye patch in this mess, but then again, i don't know much about fashion.