Somehow, I doubt that Games Workshop's shitty attitude towards their customers just comes from their legal department. The guys at the top at least have to sign off on it - if they aren't the ones who are pushing the policy in the first place.

Lawyers are rarely the ultimate cause of problems from corporations. They're usually enablers, not decision makers. They get more credit than they deserve for bad decisions because part of their job is to be the designated asshole for a company, but the decisions come from the top at any company that isn't completely dysfunctional. (And in companies that are completely dysfunctional the decisions come from HR anyway, not from legal.)

TFA addresses this. Well, not TFA but the FA that TFA links to. In fact, Schneier points out something I've been saying for going on a decade now:

The death of innocents and the destruction of property isn't the goal of terrorism; it's just the tactic used. And acts of terrorism are intended for two audiences: for the victims, who are supposed to be terrorized as a result, and for the allies and potential allies of the terrorists, who are supposed to give them more funding and generally support their efforts.

An act of terrorism that doesn't instill terror in the target population is a failure, even if people die. And an act of terrorism that doesn't impress the terrorists' allies is not very effective, either.

That's some QFT right there. No matter how many people the terrorists kill, if an act of terrorism doesn't make the target population afraid it has failed. Conversely even if the terrorists commit an act where no one dies, if the target population freaks out anyway then they win. This is why our national response to 9/11 was so fucked up - we gave the terrorists exactly what they wanted. They wanted the population of the US to be afraid and they got what they wanted. For a while, anyway.

Schneier gets into all of your objections, BTW. You may not agree with his analysis, but he has answers for why we haven't seen more examples like the one you put down. It mostly comes down to the fact that despite what movies and 24 want us to believe, terrorism is actually somewhat difficult to pull off successfully and has more complex logistics than people want to believe. Especially when you're trying to commit a terrorist act in a country where the majority of the population is openly hostile towards your goals. (Terrorism is a hell of a lot easier in an occupied state like Ireland or Iraq or Afghanistan than it is in the US precisely because in those places a good-sized chunk of the population agree/agreed with the terrorists in ideology if not in the means they were using to achieve their goals.)

Games Workshop is a strange beast. They've been like this for a long time. They treat their fans fairly poorly all around in general, and the fans generally put up with it.

From what I understand, it's mostly a social network thing. There's a critical mass of gamers in a local area and while they might all at any point in time be severely pissed off at GW over something, it's not enough for them to dump their expensive investment in GW games and start doing something else. They'll complain about it, but it doesn't impact them directly enough to do more than that. Warhammer - and moreso Warhammer 40k - has been around long enough and people have enough of a financial and emotional investment in the game that GW seems to think that they don't need to worry about what the fans think of their business actions. Which at least for the moment seems to be true. Longer term GW might piss off fans enough that this bites them in the ass, but there seems to be something fairly compelling about the Warhammer 40k property (that I don't see myself, I guess) that keeps even the most angry 40k gamer coming back for more.

I wish I had mod points:

This isn't restricted to video game companies - ALL content publishing companies underestimate the lure of "right of first sale" has on a good-sized portion of their customer base. The ability to turn around and re-sell a book, game, movie, TV boxed set, comic book, whatever is built into some of their customers' purchase plans right from the beginning. So they don't view that $50 purchase as a $50 expenditure - they see it as maybe a $35 expense and they're going to get back $15 when they eventually sell it. If they can't re-sell it then it isn't worth $50 to them because it was never worth $50 to them in the first place. It was always a $35 purchase in their eyes.

Spore is probably a bit of an outlier, though, for a variety of reasons. First, EA hyped that game for a good while before it was released, so you're going to get more people wanting to see what all of the fuss was about than you might have otherwise (EA's advertising did the job it's supposed to, in other words). Then EA decided to poke people in the eye with their copy protection for it. Which meant that you had people who wanted to break it because it was a challenge and people who wanted to break it to make a statement and people who just wanted to break it to flip the bird to EA on general principles.

But I think you're right that if a game is popular enough the pirates will take interest in it, if only to make it available to others even if they're no interested in it themselves. Amusingly, it would seem like games that get that popular are the games that the industry really has to worry the least about in terms of piracy - if it's gotten that popular and if you've done your jobs right, it has probably made you a ton of money through the legit channels and you should be moving on to worry about secondary licensing deals for your new "hot" property. It's the games that appeal to the hard core gamers but never get out of that hard core demographic that seem like piracy would be a pain in the neck for publishers - the game is popular in the demographic you set out to appeal to, but you're not making money on it despite its popularity. That's got to sting - and eventually lead to publishers looking for some other group to target with their games if it gets bad enough. (Like dropping hard core PC gamers and targeting hard core console gamers instead.)

And interestingly enough, if the folks who are playing "Imagine Babysitter" and "Pony Lover DS" are paying customers and the folks who are playing "FFVI" or "Kid Icarus" are pirating it, that gives the company an incentive to produce more "Imagine Babysitter"-type games and fewer of the games pirates like. Especially if the games that people are paying for are cheaper to develop and produce than the games that pirates like.

Ah yes - that's exactly how retail works. You stock your shelves with crap no one buys, and when no one buys it you buy more crap no one buys. That's the way to be a successful retailer!

Have you thought that perhaps, just perhaps, those games might just sell really well for the retailers and that's why they have them on the shelves, and restock them when they sell out? Just because you don't want to buy it, that doesn't mean that there aren't a whole lot of people out there who do.

Of course it's predictable. And Monsanto either got lucky or figured out the probabilities before hand given that their "Round-up ready" crops are getting ready to fall out of patent protection sometime in the next few years. Just as they're ready to lose their monopoly, their crop becomes useless.

If it wasn't luck that's "planned obsolescence" at its finest. I actually will not be surprised if Monsanto has a new crop that is immune to a new herbicide ready to go sometime shortly after their patent expires - maybe just before it expires. And all this research about how weeds are now "round-up ready" will be used as marketing material by Monsanto to push their new crop and the new herbicide when the time comes. Monsanto may be fairly high up on the Evil rating as far as corporations go, but Evil doesn't mean Stupid.

How small is too small?

DS cartridges aren't very big, and it seems to be a fairly popular format.

No. You didn't.

I think the OP is wondering how that squares with this:

If there's "no proof" that anyone in IT viewed the images, how did the picture of the kid eating candy end up in the hands of a school administrator?

I don't think the word you're looking for is "upscale". I think the word is "commercialized". Yes commercialized things can sometimes be upscale, but upscale stores generally don't have drive-thru windows.

What he's saying seems to be this:

You start with a potential pool of sales - 100% of the iPhone user base. From that you want to compute "sales lost due to piracy". If you measure it by "only 20% of the people who play my game have paid for it, so 80% of my potential sales are lost due to piracy" then you get the measure that the industry usually talks about. But if you're talking "lost sales" then the article author is arguing that's not really right - if 80% of the people playing your game are pirates and only 10% of the population of customers who own the phone even have the possibility to BE pirates, then you've lost a lot more sales to some reason other than piracy.

I see where he's coming from - the stupid 80% number they bandy around is meaningless - but his reasoning isn't that much better. It's a different way to approach the problem, but he's missing the fact that the potential customer pool isn't really 100% of the people who own an iPhone, and that's the key question. If 50% of the people who own a phone are interested in your game that's one thing - the size of the potential customer base dwarfs the number of potential pirates. But if only 5% of the people who own the phone are interested at all in your game then the overlap between interested parties and potential pirates becomes much more important to your bottom line. And I suspect that when you see companies bandy around that 80% figure what that means is that the size of their base of people potentially interested in their game is small and has a high overlap with people willing to pirate it.

And that's not even getting into the behavior of pirates that's linked to in the article - where pirates are willing to download and try A LOT of stuff because it's free for them to do so, so they do it. But that doesn't mean they stick with it and use it forever. It's disposable to them - they play with it for a while and move on to some new shiny toy. Those aren't lost sales in any meaningful sense - if they hadn't been able to get it for free they never would have tried it in the first place. Which means that the overlap between "pirates" and "people interested in my game" is in many senses artificially high because the people in the group "pirates" are interested in almost EVERYTHING that they can get their hands on, even if only for a short period of time, because they're not paying for it.

Um yeah.

This domain name scheme isn't going to work like that. 2g1c and things of its ilk are pranks - things that your kid's idiot friends will show him. There is just about nothing more resourceful on this planet than a 13 year old kid who wants to find a way to gross out a friend for a prank. Even if this domain scheme could actually manage to put all of the porn on the internet behind a single 3-letter domain, your kid's friends will find a way to emotionally scar him. 2g1c is just a means to an end in that respect.

But to get back to the question of "protecting your kid from porn" (rather than "protecting your kid from the gross-out"), think about how ridiculous the whole idea sounds - given the Internet as it exists today, do you really think it's possible that somehow this scheme will manage to move ALL OF THE PORN ON THE INTERNET behind the .xxx domain? It's a ludicrous idea - each country controls their own domain space, and so they'd all have to buy in. And then, if your kid is even halfway intelligent, he's going to quickly figure out that there are these things out on the internet called "proxies" and that he can get into the porn ghetto pretty damn easily no matter what kind of domain name filtering you're having your ISP do on your behalf. And if you're relying on a local blacklist of the .xxx domain to keep the porn away from your kid, he'll figure that one out even faster.

As a nice side benefit, your kid will probably know quite a bit about how computers, the Internet and TCP/IP work before leaving High School. So there are a few merits to this approach.

Because if you have a certain mindset, if the government doesn't make it illegal then the government approves of it. It's even worse if there's a place specifically cordoned off for the purpose of propagating the "immorality" they despise - that makes it seem like the government approves of it even more. And, like most people, they don't like their government approving of things that they disapprove of. So you get moralist crusades against drugs, gambling, alcohol, prostitution, porn, video games, and just about anything else that the moralist doesn't like. Setting up a sanctioned area for porn is like setting up a sanctioned area for gambling or a sanctioned area for prostitution - the government is saying "it's okay to do that here" and in their minds the government should never be giving approval for "immoral" activity at all - the government should at best be criminalizing it and at worst not saying anything about it. It's the mindset that got Prohibition enacted into law in the 20s and the same mindset that keeps the "War on Drugs" going despite its consistent failure to do anything about the actual drug problems of the US. It doesn't matter that what the government is doing doesn't work - the only thing that matters is that the government is taking the "correct" moral stance.