<img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/offtopic.gif" alt="" />
When computers became personal, which was a revolutionary thing in the eighties, software for running the metal became popular only due to floppy disks. Such a media as you know is based on magnetising bits in the same way that music gets recorded on tape. Loud Speakers have powerful magnets in them, and it is quite probable to place a magnetic data media right beside one of those magnets. Also CRT monitors of good quality come with built in degaussing coils that emit very powerful demagnetising fields, and THAT was the major concern behind allowing users to backup their rightfully purchased software and make copies
Therefore the software customer as much as the audio customer must have all the rights to protect their property while software users do have more to say because of the dependency of secondary produced added value on the original software. You may still sit on a chair, which a hammer contributed in making after the hammer breaks but you may not be able to print a story that took three years to write if your word processor fails to start if you did not take the measures to protect your hard work by keeping a printed copy of your work as often as you produced. But if the work is huge and incorporated a team assembly such as electronic encyclopaedia materials then the problem becomes even worse.
Personal copies are as legal as making copies of the key to your home for your wife/ husband and kids, yet thieves do have the means to make copies or pick locks and that is why more pick-resistant designs came to be a reality. Physical locks with code that must be memorised came before the idea transferred to the implementation of CD keys. CDs may get scratched easier than magnetic tape could be demagnetised.
DVDs are even more sensitive to clean-room conditions, dust, and mechanical tear-and-wear etcetera. Protecting the software programming companies must come in parallel with protecting their customers who make their existence meaningful. Honest people would very normally call the police on seeing a burglar tampering with a neighbour’s lock Software police must become a reality very soon but TCPA and Palladium ideas are rip-offs and disastrous monopoly oriented concepts that we must fight as strong as we fight piracy. Larian Studios might not be able to produce a game that runs on MSOS unless they paid Bill a quota to allow them such application or else they have to crack and hack their way from a backdoor and be labelled as software terrorists while the fact is that Intel-Microsoft coalition is the true offenders here due to unlimited ambitions of dominance.
Live and let live.
In the old days, when a customer had problems with his authentic software media, he returned it to the nearest agent and replaced it while the vendor took care of the rest of the business. Now there are much organised pirating establishments in untouchable Countries that it is impossible to implement such a policy.
Customer education is the major key for a solution. If customers reject pirated copies as they reject kissing a leprous, pirates shall not find a source of income and look for another source. So why does youngsters and many individuals encourage pirated software other than software being overpriced to make it out of reach?
Software must become cheaper to the limit of bread because no thief copies bread. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
Jewellery imitations do exist because of the high price as well.
So how does software gets priced is beyond my understanding.
Eventually, in the future, there shall be such a medium that holds the data, but which needs a major powerful manufacturing facility to produce it in mass quantities. Software creators shall be clients of such firms and place their orders then distribute the product at low profit to keep them alive at dignified standards but not to become a Gates. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/biggrin.gif" alt="" />
Only then shall the problem be solved.

Cheers. <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wave.gif" alt="" />