Iscabis - I'm really confused, what "day" are you talking about here? There has always been piracy. Look back to even the origins of currency, there were people "pirating" currency by making their own clones of coins and papers. In software, piracy was an issue even back in the early 1980s, with a lot of people (geeks) either exchanging code via printouts (that you could re-enter yourself manually) or via diskettes. Application developers started creating things like hardware keys to combat this (like parallel port based ones), while others made master key diskettes among other things which were bound to the application. A lot of this was before my time, but I have heard about it in my research over the years. Piracy has been a debate for a long long time, and I always tried to understand both sides.
Even in the 1980s, game developers also jumped on the bandwagon, with sometimes very elaborate designs. For example, the original "Terminator" game had a wheel which was a very deep red color with black symbols on it, which you had to rotate based off what the game asked to generate the correct response. Due to the color of the wheel, it was almost impossible to photocopy. The game itself was easily pirated, but the wheel made it much harder to play without it.
Even adventure, flight, and RPG games started doing things like requesting data from the manual of the game (What word is on the 15th page on the third paragraph, three words across?). In terms of music piracy, "trackers" were replicating popular songs in .xm, .mid, .s3m, etc. formats pre-mp3s. WAVs were also sometimes shared, but most of all, cassette tapes were the primary source of music "piracy" especially the very popular "mix tapes" of the 80s and early 1990s. CDR burners almost completely eliminated the need for tapes by the end of the 1990s.
Furthermore, pre-internet there existed BBSs, which were in every state and in many countries. Every major area of the US had at least 20-30 BBSs, with probably half of them devoting a portion of their purpose to piracy. The rest were official business boards (game developers for example), chatlines, or dedicated to what were called "DOOR" games, like Legend of the Red Dragon, Global Conquest, or MajorMUD. The pirate BBSs, especially the "topsites" had every single game and application within hours of their release and then spread across the nation very quickly. Piracy aside, developers and publishers would use their own boards to share patches (which were pretty rare at the time), free content, or just to run community events.
Piracy is not the killer of media, at least one that is the end all be all of a specific platform's development. People need to accept that it will never be stopped, it's the realistic truth. There is not enough room in the jails for the pirates, and executing them will do nothing but harm to society. Banning pirates from computers will no doubt hurt economies worldwide, because they are tech geeks who contribute to the working world. I would estimate that almost all but say a small percentage of pirates do actually buy software, movies, and music quite frequently. It's really the local areas of Chinese and Russian markets where you'll find people who really do not ever purchase legit media. If you think you can change those areas of the world, good luck. Getting them to pay full price for anything media related would be nearly impossible and it's not going to happen anytime soon - they don't have the money. If companies try to combat this by lowering their prices in these poorer regions, then these people will make a business off re-exporting the cheaper product back to the countries who are paying more for it.
In my opinion, piracy did not kill the studio behind Titan Quest, it was a poor excuse to try to take some blame off THQ. THQ should have owned up to the situation and said "Damn, we should have done all these other things like more marketing, better QA standards, less efforts on implementing high end anti-piracy measures, etc." The reality is, most Developers and Publishers accept the fact that piracy exists and always has existed, so it's not like they're crying themselves to sleep every time they release a game. It's hyped up and used as an excuse way more often than it should be. In terms of quality, some can argue both for and against the quality of Titan Quest. The marketing campaign for it was virtually non-existent. The game itself was protected by some very very strong anti-piracy measures, which actually made it one of the least pirated games. Per the logic of many on this board, due to the fact that it was for awhile almost impossible to pirate, that it should have sold exceptionally well. Well, it didn't. It sold ok. THQ didn't want to market it well, and the build wasn't as stable as it should have been.
The sad thing is, piracy probably would have done Titan Quest some good. Had more of the "pirate" community checked it out, it probably would have sold more copies. Instead, the pirates played other games and ignored it. The general gaming community didn't really even hear much about Titan Quest (as also shown on this board), so even to general consumers they just were not all that aware of it. None of this is to say that I condone piracy (my game collection would certainly say otherwise), just that they purposely made it nearly impossible to pirate thus cutting out a very large part of the world community.
Anyways, I had to respond to this. In terms of software, music, and movies, there really hasn't been a day where piracy didn't exist. There have always been attempts to pirate each of them, and attempts to stop it. If more companies acted like Relic and Stardock, they'd find themselves in a much better position.
Also, speaking of consoles, the Wii, PS2, Xbox 360, PSP, and Nintendo DS have all been cracked and their games are pirated very very frequently. Consoles are not immune at all.
In the end, movies still sell, games still sell, music still sells, and people are still getting rich off media. How many pirates do you know that are living out in McMansions in Hollywood and driving exotic sports cars while smoking imported cuban cigars? Lastly, nearly everyone on this planet at some point has had some form of piracy in their hands. Whether it be a photocopied article, a mix tape, a copied cd, a VHS tape with a movie, or a copy of a game, you'd almost certainly be a liar if you said you hadn't been a part of it at some point in your life. It's not like the war on drugs where a fraction of the population may take part, it's something that almost everyone who has access to media in the entire world has participated in. People would be better off using their resources for other battles where quality of life is really affected. You can start with child labor, slavery, kidnapping for ransom, etc.
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