I'm going to be a bit aggressive, but I'm not trying to be insulting.

Every point you make is wrong.

"Quick question for you then: What needs to be done about piracy so consumers won't be forced through these truly stupid (yet seemingly necessary, according to DRM supporters) hoops?"

It doesn't matter. A company has two groups: those who pay and those who pirate. They have failed to stop the pirates despite trying for, lemme' check the clock, three decades. By increasing problems for legitimate consumers while failing to stop what you are supposedly fighting, you increase the likelihood that you will turn legit consumers into pirates to avoid your methods. This isn't a moral issue, it's an economic issue.

Unless the core issue of theft is addressed, honest gamers will always suffer.

First off, it's not theft, it's copyright infringement. While copyright maximalists are trying their damnedest to equate the two in court, the two concepts are on different continents. Theft deprives someone of something finite. Copyright recognizes the infinite nature of data, but accords the creator of that data the right to profit from it.

Honest gamers will suffer, but for absolutely no reason. It doesn't stop the pirates, and blaming that on the pirate is silly. To steal your example, it's the same as saying that the houses are being broken into by black people, so the police start harassing innocent blacks in the neighborhood. It's ridiculous to blame the thieves for the police harassment. You blame the police. You blame the thieves for their crime.

"It's like having a leaky roof and termites and thinking you'll save money by dropping a bucket here and there and buying a can of bug spray. That quick fix soon turns to the need for a new roof or a new house when things get out of hand. In gaming, it's been out of hand for years.

It boils down to "Oh well, it had to happen!" or "Hell no, something needs to be done!" The industry seems to prefer that gray area where nothing or not much is done to prevent the problem, so dumping it all over the consumer's doorstep is the easy route because we'll bitch loudly at it for a while, then eventually accept it as "normal"

I really have no idea what you're getting at, here. I don't understand your roof and termite analogy. Data is not a roof and nothing eats it.

But If you're talking about the industry not trying hard enough to stop piracy, what else do you expect them to do? They are lobbying for incredibly draconian copyright laws, using US trade agreements to force American copyright and trademark law on other countries, and slapping increasingly-aggressive forms of control over their products.

And unfortunately for these companies, consumers may well stop accepting it as normal. They will drive more people to piracy because the piracy becomes a better product. The goal of the company is to add as much value as possible to their product, thus driving people to buy the game as the superior product. By making it a pain, they reduce the value of the product.

"The reality of the situation is theft is theft, and if we all just sit around and say "well, that's that", we deserve the DRM, no resale tactics and other nonsense. If you had a bunch of home break-ins in your area, would you just shrug your shoulders and say "Oh well, I'll be next anyway, so let me just put my valuables where they can be easily reached"?

Yes it is. But this isn't theft. It's copyright infringement. Theft requires the deprivation of someone of something finite. Copyright wackos try to say that the theft is the "chance of sale," which would be fine if an increase in piracy was directly correlated with a decrease in sales, but that isn't the case. Without that link, it's a merely hypothetical loss. This is opposed to your example, where once my items are stolen, I no longer have them. I cannot steal someone's data. If I copy it, they still have it.

But your example is even further off than that. If a pirate copies a game, it is not mine. A pirate copying Halo 3 does not make my copy disappear. I have lost nothing. A home break-in and data copying are again 100% different.

Moreover, even if we assume the validity of your example, you now seem to be placing the onus of responsibility on those who buy the games, as opposed to earlier where you blamed the pirates. I shall again go to my example, instead of blaming the police, should we berate the locals for not sending out a mob to hunt down the thieves? You seem to want to blame everyone except those who are acting stupidly: the companies.

Why are they acting stupidly? Because the goal of a company is to make money. They are tilting against a windmill and losing money in the process. Their goal is not to "fight the good fight" and stop these evil pirates.

"Can piracy be stopped completely? Probably not. People who want stuff for free are going to find ways to steal it. Should piracy be as easy as it is now? Hell no. Putting more locks on your house only works until the thieves can pick them quicker."

AGAIN, it's not stealing. Huge difference. The pejorative tone to your statement is obvious, but you're performing what's known in psychological circles as the fundamental attribution error. Who's to say that 100% of those copying the software didn't do so purely because it's available for free, and would have never bought it if it wasn't available free? I have a new copy of 3D Studio Max. I've never used it. I haven't even installed it. But I have it simply because it was there. If it wasn't for the file-sharing community, I would have never known the program existed.

Again, what do you propose they should do to make piracy even harder? Only sell the games in locked cartridges that can only be checked out from a central store house for periods of one hour? And your position seems to shift again with your comment about locks. You're now blaming the companies, but only for not trying hard enough to stop piracy, and say they need to do more than simply put more locks (DRM) on the house (the product).

Again, if a person actually had a house covered in locks, and they got broken into, would you then turn and tell them for being idiots for having something else besides locks on all of their doors? What the hell else is there? Chained windows? Last turrets? Dogs with bees in their mouths so when they bark they shoot bees at you.

"Since we're too far gone to think of one core solution to piracy, I say find an unshakable legal means to shut these guys down. Or at least slow them to a crawl if not outright force them into legal hell until they run out of money. Hell, if a big conglomerate like Monsanto can use the aforementioned tactics to put honest US farmers out of business for doing something innocent like saving heirloom seeds they don't want Monsanto to "own", you'd think going after people who are real criminals would be a cinch for the entertainment industry..."

I know of a sure solution: stop trying to stop it. USE it to make money. It's a natural economic force. The cost of a product will fall to the marginal cost of making a new copy of that product. For data on a global network, that cost is zero. Data is inherently free. It's an economic force that cannot be stopped.

They are suing everyone in sight. They're passing new laws all around the world. They're doing every legal thing they can to stop this. The problem is that there is no central "guy" on which they can focus their energy. They take on guy down, one hundred more replace him.

The Monstanto issue and this are, again, completely different. Monsanto is a patent issue, not copyright. The legal issue is that Monsanto has a patent on the end result of their product, the seed genetics, which means they legally own the seeds, a finite good, which the farmers are supposedly stealing.

And even if we assume that Monsanto is in the right, the reason they're successful is that you can't secretly grow soy beans. You need land, water, equipment, etc. To copy data, you need an old computer and the data. That's it.

And, real criminals? Are you insane? You're going to liken people who copy a game to murders and rapists, who are certainly "real" criminals? Does that mean that anyone who copied a VCR tape from a friend is a real criminal? Or how about someone who makes a mix-tape? Or someone who passes a new novel around the office? The distribution network is smaller, but the concept is the same. By your definition, all of these people are real criminals.