I'll put forth Starsiege Tribes as one game or a series of game that suffered from piracy. Sure the company that developed this game might not have been the best ran, but the number of people who paid for this game vs those who played was considerable. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starsiege:_Tribes "Starsiege: Tribes sold a total of 210,000 copies, but due to its small size and complete lack of copy protection was frequently copied and distributed over the Internet. Actual users at the peak of popularity were over one million users." - meaning that the game had effectively ZERO DRM 800K Piraters vs 200K payers. Ask yourself what an appropriate ratio is? Long story short the game was very successful in terms of the number of gamers actively playing it. They were ran by a company that was not spending it on hookers on blow, but they did maybe have more employees than they should have. From what I hear part way through the sequel, tribes 2, they were becoming insolvent and released the game a few months too early. "Tribes 2 sold a total of 400,000 copies," but i remember it being filled with bugs and issues. The series died after this as the company went under, but for those who played both games, it was regarded as the best squad based FPS at the time. It was years ahead of battlefield, call of duty multi, and operation flashpoint. What could have saved the series and game, slightly better management for sure but what if they were able to sell another 100K copies of Tribes 1 which would not have been unreasonable. They could spent at least 6 more months working on Tribes 2 and all the issues they had would have been resolved and we'd be talking about tribes 8. When it comes to piracy I feel the ones that hurt the most are those who release better than average wares that aren't outstanding, but with a few more dollars it could have been.

Again the creation of top level domains was flawed.

Here's what they should have done.

1) All top level domains end in 2 letter country codes and move all the .com .net etc to .com.us and .net.us.

2) So what would happen with slashdot.com after it got moved to slashdot.com.us?

You first set your browser's country code. Most of us reading this would set this .us centric. In your browser you type in the URL slashdot.com and the browser will autmatically append .us. However the URL will still appear as slashdot.com. It's completely transparent for .us users.

Now if we look at this gmail example, users from germany would set their browser to be .de centric. When they want to visit gmail.com, the browser would direct them to gmail.com.de. IF they want to visit google mail, they would need to type in gmail.com.us.

HOWEVER, say you're an american travelling in germany with your laptop. Well since your browser is set to act as .us centric. You will still type in gmail.com and that will direct you to gmail.com.us.

Ahhhh how elegant a solution and it will be completely transparent for Americans (I will sell this idea for 1 paypal penny $US :) ).

It makes it harder for google/yahoo to dominate the world cause they would want to purchase .yahoo.com.[code] in every country OR they pay firefox to set the country centric code to .us ... and we have the same system as we do now. Nice!

I think this is an appropriate sacrifice for the decrease in lawsuits between countries and domain names.