Pardon my ignorance but can you name a few of the works that were never created but would surely have been created if it weren't for the piracy?

Sure I can, as long as I have big enough army of lawyers. Would you like to be sued and spend the next 3 years tied up in that lawsuit or just pay the measly 0.01$ per letter "e"?

For me this seems fairly similar to claiming that Doom, Quake and a number of other FPS games should not exist because they're clones of Wolf3D.

Losing the account wouldn't matter. However, losing the password would, since a lot of people use the same password for a lot of other sites

So where (and when) exactly does copying a certain number of bytes constitute a theft?

What about the Estonian e-voting system? Can you point out any insecure parts in that system?

Some of the more common scenarios (man in the middle, vote buying and a few others) are addressed in chapter 4.6 of an analysis of e-voting security(warning: large PDF file).

just underwear?

Are you implying that what they're doing is OK, as long as they produce the episodes of American Idol and such?

Step 2 can be fixed by either banning or requiring an ID and registering purchases of camcorders.

Does spending a certain amount of money on a movie give you the right to sell a copy of the movie to anyone but only allow a subset of those people to view the movie they have bought?

I don't know about you but having a router that could send/receive 400 Gbps sounds extremely good. In fact, this should be good enough for at least 5 years, if not 10.

Will Joe the Introvert always choose the cubicle and Jane the Extravert always sit in the open area with her friends?

4 or 5 is ok, too, IMO but only if all of them are in the same team (QA in one section of the office, office IT in another, etc). After all, the reason why the people are organized into different rooms is to encourage them to work better as a team.

The desks should be arranged so that one person can't see other person's screen. Everyone facing towards the center of the room, for example.

Provide the employees good headphones or encourage them to buy those themselves. Have soundproof conference rooms that people can use for phone conferences or even regular phone calls. Having to listen business people talk on the phone 8 hours per day is quite horrible.

This is a must. Get everyone a jabber account (set up a local server for that) or if you're into Microsoft software, use Office Communicator. Make sure every employee can contact any other employee via the instant messenger. Make sure that private contacts cannot be added, thus enforcing the "use this only for work related stuff" mentality.

I disagree with this for a few reasons.
Firstly, watching some instructional Youtube video may actually help if the employee is stuck with some problem (granted, this is not a common case but realistic nonetheless).

Secondly, you can't force people to work 8 or more consecutive hours. Unless you handcuff me to a chair, I will take a few minute breaks every now and then either to rest my eyes from staring at the screen or get my mind off the task I'm working on. I can read the news in Slashdot or the dead-tree newspaper near the coffee machine - is there a principial difference? Punishing me for doing this is unfair and makes me question the manager's sanity.

Thirdly, there are better ways to raise the efficiency of an employee. Have regular status update meetings (at most 20 minutes long per team) where every team member has to explain what tasks has he/she completed after the previous meeting. Constantly reporting simplistic tasks like deploying new version of some piece of software in local development environment means that either you have serious problems with the environment or you aren't trying hard enough. Either way, the manager should then go to the employees desk to see what exactly the problem is.

Having to improvise on those meetings (inventing tasks that haven't been done for example) and sounding believable at the same time is quite difficult.It is much easier to talk about the things that have actually been done.

If you find out that an employee is watching Youtube or reading Slashdot all day long, have a strongly worded chat with him and if that doesn't work, fire the person. By blocking various sites, you're effectively saying that you don't trust the employees to be able to manage their working time. A successful working relationship is built on mutual trust. Unless you really lock down the computers (no software installations, no browser configuration of any kind), there are ways around the block.

Notice the difference? Well, neither can I.

Steps 3 and beyond are irrelevant. Unless the judge tosses the lawsuit right away, there are going to be ways to stall and delay the process enough to run anyone into bankruptcy.
A corporation suing someone is effectively similar to saying that that someone will sooner or later submit to the will of the corporation. If that someone fights back, they'd be bankrupted and made an example of (see the Tenenbaum case, for example).

How long did it take for the SCO case to go from step 3 to step 4?