While well intentioned, the original poster is making, in my view, one big misconception (which to be fair, applies with many game publishers and developers too).

Sucessfully fighting piracy DOES NOT mean higher sales.

The reason is that many pirates either cannot afford the game in question (young 'uns with little pocket money, people living in countries with very low wages) or are habitual freeloaders (who would just switch to some other game instead).

If the anti-piracy mechanism used is one that inconveniences legitimate customers, then battling piracy can result in lost sales (note the Boycott Starforce campaign and, on the other hand, the good sales for Galactic Civilizations II which used no CD-checks at all - though subsequent patches did require online authentication which is worse in my view).

I personally boycotted Beyond Divinity until Larian released the patch removing (or rather disabling) Starforce. Of course, by the time they did this, the game was priced at bargain-basement prices but at least that eased my disappointment with the game after buying it.

CD checks can cause serious inconvenience to people who like to play games on laptops (you have to carry your CD collection with you, exposing it to damage, and you have to keep a CD/DVD drive installed potentially losing the option of having a second battery on some systems). Online authentication means the game becomes unplayable if the developer/publisher goes out of business (sadly, quite a common event in the games industry) and also causes problems for those lacking permanent Internet connections or who, for security, use a non-connected PC for gaming.

The only acceptable online mechanism in my view would be the "once only, ever" type where you enter a registration code, receive another in return which you can keep safe and then use for all subsequent program installations. Stardock's method comes close, but fails in that it requires re-authentication when installed on another PC.

Ultimately, the key to good sales is providing the buyer with a good experience. That means a quality game with no intrusive copy protection.