Eliminating piracy does not generate revenue (Score 1)

What other people have been saying still holds true. Unfortunately for software publishers, it makes a certain amount of sense to measure piracy in terms of lost profits (how else would you measure it as a monetary figure?), but the fact is that the vast majority of pirates are opportunitists who simply wouldn't use the software if they were forced to pay. A few would, of course, but a very small proportion of the total.

The classic example of this behavior is Microsoft, who now has such a vast majority of the market that they have to look into other avenues to expand -- and have aimed their guns at the pirates with the registration in Windows XP. But they're missing the key point: People who are pirating XP aren't going to pay for it if you magically force them to stop pirating. (Any antipiracy system is exploitable, anyway.) So the net effect after all is said and done is very little change in revenue, and a bunch of inconvenienced customers. Wasn't there a time when a company was supposed to provide a service to its customers for a profit, not put shackles on preexisting customers who have coughed up the dough?

For the record, I've purchased two shareware titles in the last month: Ricochet and Uplink.