To play devil's advocate for a second, seeing as though the courts dismissed the case, and the legwork was done by the ESA (not exactly competent in catching drug dealers), I think very few actual crimefighting man-hours were lost here... Unless you count the prosecution's time, in which case, if I as a foreigner understand correctly, there's still no shortage of lawyers in the U.S.
One thing, though. Ever played EVE Online? Let me tell you a little story.
The game's got some issues. Mainly technological (it lags like hell under a special set of circumstances) and some to do with game content, balancing, etc. These are other issues but the point is, they have existed for years.
When they were identified as serious problems by the community, for a while there was a wall of silence from the game makers (CCP). For some issues this went on for years, months for some. All the while the community whined away through every channel available to them, most publicly on the game's official forums. At some point the whining had gone on long enough without response that the hopelessness became an in-joke.
Recently, EVE has gained popularity and matured as a product. As a result, CCP has grown and matured as well. And so, they now have some more-or-less strict and very public standards for fixing important issues. What they do now is put together teams of specially hired developers with skills in problems of a specific nature, and assign that team a specific issue. The aforementioned lag, for instance.
What this means for the players is that the issues I was talking about have started to get fixed. There's steady improvement that's visible to the naked eye. All the while, game development goes on normally by the actual developers according to their internal roadmap. Fixing issues goes on in parallel.
Every time there's a new version of EVE, with shiny new features and goodies like ships or other content, there's handful of noisy idiots who start whining on the forums about fixing lag, game balance, the UI or whatever. They demand that CCP halt whatever they are doing until the lag etc. are fixed. Even though the developers are mostly in no way up to to the task like the actual issue-fixing-teams are. Those whine posts on the forums are among the most annoying stuff you could possibly read on there.
Now...
"Whoever enforce IP laws are full of shit, they should be out fixing real issues like murder, like the FBI/police homicide divisions are."
Get my drift?
