*sigh*
The point I am making about the tax programs is people NEED them. If one of them is different than the rest, people aren't going to use it. You cannot say the same thing about games.
The message the company will get will be to stop developing games for PCs, where pirate copies and torrents have killed the market. They will instead make them for consoles.
And as far as positive reinforcement of negative behavior, do you think the companies really give a fuck about a few people torrenting the game and emailing them, especially after they made a huge killing on 360 sales? And just think of what would happen if the company lost a lot of sales to piracy, and had all these emails from people who openly admit pirating the game. Can anyone say lawsuit / ISP complaint? I may be going a bit far, but it seems to me if they have ips and emails of people who admit pirating, they can then go and connect to you and nail you with filesharing.
I mean, I fully support pirating, but only when you cannot afford the game.
What is so incredibly bad about the DRM anyway? No rootkit, easily bypassed, no system problems... Other than the obvious "OMG IT HAS DRM FUCK THIS GAME" bullshit, what is the big problem? Sure, there are some people on 2k forums who can't get the game running, but there are ALWAYS people who can't run a game, no matter what the reason.
I really don't see DRM in games as much of a problem. I've never run into a problem, I've had no problems with Bioshock, and as long as the reactivation tool works correctly, I see no problems with it in the future.
edit: It just really pisses me off when there's this great game that comes out, it's taken forever to develop, it's nothing like other popular games, and it's a spiritual successor to one of the best first person RPGs ever, and all these whiny little fuckwads go on a power trip because it has some DRM in it.
Pirating a game just because it has DRM simply tells the company to spend more money on better DRM, increasing their overhead and lowering the number of games they wish to release. It will also make the company look more towards consoles, since games are much harder to pirate.
You are not helping the problem, you are making it worse. If we purchase games with low level DRM and crack it instead of downloading the game, maybe the publishing houses will stick to low level DRM. If their games are pirated like crazy, guess what? They are going to up their DRM. Make it stronger, more of a pain in the ass, more restrictive.
The limit to installs that Bioshock has is a DIRECT RESULT of people pirating games and circumventing the DRM.