Piracy is fucking the world over

[MetalMilitia]

While i believe Piracy is not doing software/film companies any favours it could be the thing that finally makes them re-think their priceing and distribution methods.

For instace a CD album costs about £15 in a shop like HMV but these days you can usually download the album for under 1 pound a track from a music site. It may not be much of an improvement but its a start and hopefully soon CDs in shops will have their prices reduced.

In regards to games the fact of the matter still remains that if you want to play online you will need a ligit copy. There is not really any way around that unless a warez group are really smart and find some obscure way around the CD key checks (like EMPORIO seem to have done with HL2, via some fancy reverse engineering of steam).
Also i have found that even the most warez savy people will still buy a game if they deem it worthy of the high £35 price tag.

I think valve have had the right idea in distributeing HL2 via steam and having an online verification system which, while not bulletproof, still seems to have eliminated a great deal of piracy at the cost of pissing off a few people who do not have a net connection.
I expect we will start seeing other companies using this method soon.

Films seem to be the only media which really is loosing the battle against piracy, and i cannot forsee them doing anything about it any time soon so they are probably going to have to rely of box office sales more than DVD sales in the future.
But at the same time DVD writers are still not very widespread so people wanting to watch DVDs on their fancy 42" TV in their living room are still going to be buying alot of DVDs.

I guess some really smart person is going to have to think of a new method of copy protection which is uncrackable, but this is a long way off.