I write software for a living too, and so do many of my friends.

If you are "losing" money, it is because your business model is ill-concived.

(N.B., I am replying to your point alone, this does not imply that I condone anything that the pirate bay folks may have done)

I have much less of a problem being asked by a court to decrypt data than being censored abrtitrarily at the say-so of random large media companies.

This was more of a problem in the past because nobody had anybody elses source code, so cross pollination of code didn't happen and competing implementations were more often incompatible.

While I still don't like like random new things appearing outside the standards without good reason, doing it in an open source application is much less of a problem.

Because they don't know how to handly the firearm they are holding.

The more important correlation, that's perhaps harder to measure, is between "DRM whiners" and those who didn't play the game at all. I'm talking about those who wanted to play the game, but neither want DRM nor illegal copies.

The reason that's more important is because it represents a lost sale, so the games companies should care. Any statistic about pirated copies is unimportant because those versions don't have DRM anyway.

I don't particularly care about physical copies either, but I do want the right to sell my purchase to others or give as a gift (just like I can with books, cds, dvds, etc.)

I also want to be able to do whatever the law allows, not what some technical system controlled by the industry allows, and that includes future changes to the law. In short: NO TECHNICAL RESTRICTIONS ARE ACCEPTABLE.

Just use encryption (of your whole drive or partition) and forget about wiping it.

It's not that hard. For example, several modern Linux distros support encrypting your entire installation out of the box.