The world is a wonderful place. At least, it is if you happen to be a business tycoon. Everything would be corrupt in your favor. You could use the cheapest labor possible, cut any corners you want, make products with Timed Defects (TM), and then charge exhorbitant prices to boot. Lay back and enjoy that cigar.
If you are not a tycoon, the world is getting shittier by the day. You make an ever-decreasing wage with ever increasing taxes, with it to buy ever more expensive products which are becoming ever more unreliable, with ever declining quality.
Understandably, under these conditions, an increasing number of people are turning to piracy. Trade copied CD's with friends because you sure as fuck cannot afford the ones you want, download a game off of the net because it cannot possibly be worth $120. You have just become a national enemy. Mr. Tycoon and his American Dream of living off the hard work of others are now having trouble sleeping at night. The money for his cigar did not come out of your pocket.
His brow crinkled, he writes a letter to his senator, wraps it in a couple $100 bills that he got from you, and sends it off. The next morning, the senator gets to his office to find seven notes and a few thousand dollars, all telling him that these pirates are absolute evil. He feels a pressing need to address his friends' concern, and a while later, an enormous campaign begins to crush the trade of illegitimate $30 CD's that have sold a million legitimate copies anyway.
With nearly unparalleled business virtuosity, DOW Chemical has a pending patent on a business model designed to eliminate piracy. A new optical media device is in the late stages of development which will hold several times the data volume of a DVD. The unique bit is that the resin is easily distinguishable from the types that have come before it, and has a tracking stamp. The players are being built to not play any disc without that resin and stamp. This is truly wonderful: no longer can you have one optical device that can play all available optical media, because the new player will reject all discs without PCHE (polycyclohexylethylene) resin. All of this effort, just to keep you from trading Brittany Spears for Backstreet Boys with your little friends. You have money, and they want every cent of it.
We all know that the programmers for companies like Micro$oft are not making quality programs, they add features to the same old code, only rewriting old code if a workaround is more difficult, and do nothing to properly optimize it. It's not that they are bad programmers (Micro$oft actually gets the top computer science graduates), its simply that they are hired to write programs quickly, not well. They rely on the continual increase of speed and storage computers undergo to hide their inefficient code. Much of the need for larger storage media is due to this.
Everywhere you look, companies are constantly looking for ways to reduce costs, in product quality as well as efficient manufacturing methods and pay cuts. The corners and jobs that are cut are written off to the public as a necessity to compete in the brutal modern market. This is bullshit (read The Media Monopoly by Ben H. Bagdikian to find out what a huge load it actually is). DOW was making record profits during their last layoff spate, but that was not the impression given to us.
You'd think that for items so incredibly cheap to produce, we'd save money too. In fact, we do not. They charge us more for cheaper goods. They accuse losses incurred by pirates of causing the increased prices. "Projected losses from piracy" were $25 billion in the software and music industry. How reliable is this statistic? Remember that the Soviet Union's "projected nuclear arsenal" during the 60's was enough to destroy the entire world, when in fact the US outgunned them 20:1. This was a feat that the Soviet's did not accomplish until the mid 1970's; by this time, the US could already do it 5 fold. We see that the people making these statistics (and their cigars) are not at all concerned about the dishonesty of altering them, and we can almost be sure that the ratio has been preserved. In all of these cases, this smokescreen is to allow the people manufacturing the goods to create the illusion of necessity to maintain their business.
The very same companies that do this accuse the petty pirates of causing them harm? Enough people are willing to pay $400/month for an internet connection capable of downloading a full CD in reasonable time to avoid buying a $80 game that the game companies are going to lose huge amounts of money? How can a person be so greedy that when they have the profits from a CD that sold a million copies, they lament the couple thousand that were bootlegged? And of those pirates, how many do they seriously think would have bought whatever they pirated anyway, had piracy not been an option?
In a fever of greed, corporate America has decided to gouge us for every cent they can wrench, so that Mr. Tycoon can smoke more expensive cigars in a more expensive house on top of a more expensive mountain only accessable by a more expensive plane. They will stop at nothing to achieve their goal. Only a united front against their tyranny will stop society from reverting to the dark ages, where the so called nobility held all of the wealth, leaving us peasants in the mud. But you do not care, do you?