This is why companies need to fight piracy. If not, they will lose the ability to sell any product.
I'd argue this. Competition is what scares these companies to death (and primarily for them, potential competition). Piracy might be one piece of the problem for them, but as far as I see it, they have a much larger issue: value. People will pay for something if its value is greater than or equal to the price. Think of Blu-Ray. To many, the value of having a copy of a movie was not the $25-$35+ the movie companies were charging for them at first. But, as is usually the case, the price came down over time, and now people are buying them for $15-20, or maybe $25 for a new release. Also, players are selling much better. It's true that those did come down in price as well, and it's hard to determine if the price of players dropping caused the price of the media to drop, or vice versa. However, I have talked to a lot of people about this, and from what I have been told, and I do agree, is that people couldn't justify paying an extra $10-20 per movie just to have the hi-def. In other words, they would have bought the player if the discs cost about the same as DVDs. So, basically, prices went down, sales went up, and value stayed the same.
Software, however has a completely different problem, even though it still stems directly from value. 10-15 years ago, if you wanted to do high end photo editing, Photoshop was the only real game in town. As time progressed, so did technology, and programmers were able to write photo editors with much more ease, and distribution of software matured. No longer did someone with a large program have to pay a company to do CD stamping, box design, etc. Now we even have quite good OSS to do many of the same things (GIMP, obviously). So, now the value of any particular piece of software is declining due to competition, not to piracy. Professional photographers, I promise you, will still shell-out for a legitimately licensed copy of Photoshop. If they don't need something quite like that but still want support, maybe they buy Paint Shop Pro or the like. GIMP is for those who want the freebie (don't get me wrong--if it was a closed product, it would sell at a decent price, assuming it is as well known as it is now).
So, I guess I just see it as simple economics, and piracy is nothing more than a barely discernible blip on the radar. What has changed the game is competition, but some companies just want to whine about pirates who cost them practically nothing in lost sales (maybe increase sales in a try-before-you-buy way). They are trying to scare the competition out of the marketplace in order to keep the value of their products high, because once you have multiple options for doing the same kind of thing, the value of all programs in the group begins to fall off a cliff do to competition. Seems pretty simple to me. Play the piracy card, scare away new entrants to the market, keep the value of your stuff high, and you have it made.