Friend, if you're going to call the system broken, it seems like you should propose an alternative.
I've not myself encountered another way for artists to be sufficiently supported to continue in their art. I've certainly seen single case examples (Cory Doctorow and his one book, Stephen King and his one book), but these things don't work at scale and it's notable that neither of them did that twice.
What would you suggest?
Answer this: if it doesn't hurt anyone, then why does it matter? You know that no one is being deprived of anything that they previously owned.
You can say that they're 'stealing' potential profit, but not only is it impossible to steal objects that don't even exist, but you'd be blaming just about everyone in existence by doing so. You 'steal' potential profit merely by choosing not to give someone money or by interfering with their flow of profit. That effectively means that not buying a product from a store would mean that you have 'stole' potential profit from the store (and have therefore 'harmed' them because they would have been better off if you had given them your money).
Rather than hurting "anyone" is actually hurts "everyone". This is just another case of what's called the "tragedy of the commons". Each person who pirates a game benefits himself or herself, but if enough people do this it's no longer tenable to make games and no one has a game to play, for free or otherwise.
You can talk about people making things "for art's sake", and some people will, but a lot of them won't who would. I used to make games, and I still do in my spare time, but I work for Microsoft as my day job, so my productivity in making games isn't nearly as high as it would be if I could do it full time. Other people, people who might be fantastic artists but have a family to feed are going to be in similar spots because people pirate games. Piracy has a direct impact in reducing the profitability of the art, meaning there are fewer people who can practice it.
Oi, feeding the troll and all that, but parent is a straight-up lie. Free soda, coffee, hot chocolate, and various other beverages still avaialble at every MS office I've ever been in (and my own as of yesterday).
Honestly, MS is a fair sight better to their employees than Google is (spoken from first-hand experience here).
I used to work in the independent games industry. In 2004, I designed and wrote a little Action-Puzzle game titled Drop! (feel free to look it up on GameFaqs). We sold it in stores for $10, and online for $5, however, we got $.33 per retail copy sold (blame publishers) vs. $2.50 or so per online copy sold. We sold a few hundred thousand copies or so at retail across a 6 month period (#4 for sales for a couple months, but no one pays attention to jewel case games).
Here's the trick: the online version had an online high-score system. You could play the online copy for free, but you didn't get access to the shared high-score system unless you bought it. We sold less than 100 copies online, but saw several hundred thousand unique IP addresses hit the high score system every day (and this kept up for years, not just people "trying out the high score system").
For 6 months of work, I made about $30,000 on that (a couple other guys made similar amounts), which eventually didn't justify the effort - because people who want to play a game don't care about making it possible for the creators to keep making games.
I work for Microsoft now
Because enforcing that every application use these would mean certain sorts of applications couldn't be written (or at least not as easily).
DEP is data execution prevention. It marks certain areas of address space as being "data only", so the processor won't execute them. While this is generally a good idea, as it prevents a hacker from constructing a NOP sled and then using an access violation bug somewhere to execute code they've stuck in memory, it also has the side effect of making self-modifying code more difficult to write.
ASLR (address space layout randomization) is similar, as it breaks certain sorts of odd programming techniques like arithmetic variable addressing.
It's been relatively well established that expert systems can have high success rates for diagnosing diseases within a limited scope(for instance, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mycin).
I can imagine something more general could be put together. The main cost is in acquiring the data; the coding itself is trivial. And you could have it tell you to see a human physician when the confidence level is low. A heavy disclaimer would probably be necessary though.
Back in 2003 I worked for a little independent games outfit. We made a one-off puzzle / action game that sold for $10 in stores or $2.50 online. It had an online high-score system that counted IP's so we had an idea of how many people were playing any given day.
We sold around 30,000 copies total, but our average unique visitors per day on the high score system was around 500,000.
Now the game had no DRM, and there was a free online version that you could play as much as you wanted to that didn't let you access the high score system. This strikes me as being about as nice as you can get for a paid-for product, and we still had a 94% "piracy" rate. Even if you allow that some legitimate users may have been on dynamic IP addresses, there's no way that game wasn't being primarily played by pirates.
Since then I've had trouble believing anyone who claimed software piracy didn't cause game makers to lose money.
Thus spake the master programmer: "After three days without programming, life becomes meaningless." -- Geoffrey James, "The Tao of Programming"
