Now I don't particularly agree with LustyGoat's attitude, he does make a point. Outright piracy hurts real live people, and not just any people - the lives of the people who make the game you love so much. I'll admit right now, I have SOME warezed copies of games on my computer. The ONLY warezed anything that I have, though, are copies of either software or music that at one time, I have paid for (I move around alot, and I've had most of my posessions taken from me before), and never anything that I had the chance to pay for the first time. So yes, I can sleep well at night knowing that the copy of Game X I downloaded today WAS paid for in full, so Company Y does have my money and support.
We don't need taxpayers money used on this kind of futile hunt ATM though, since we do have much larger responsibilities for now. The answer is simple: who knows how better to take care of the problem better than gamers and game companies? Game companies should be protecting their own property in the first place. By the same token, gamers can help with this also, seeing as some of the most brilliant people in the world are online, and can share ideas on how to create a legitimate piracy-free system.
You want an example of the gaming community taking care of itself? PunkBuster. Not paid for by tax dollars, but designed by the very people it would help. People wanted cheating morons off their servers and out of their games, so they DID something about it. Now how about a way to sell games and software that allows for legal backups, but not rampant sharing? Maybe it'll require software and hardware as well... maybe you can make legal backups from the original media, but it's tailored at creation to run only on a system with your specs (a dongle, etc), so it can't be shared.
You "Piracy is taking jobs" guys are in the right here... the ones for piracy are the lazy ones who accept things as is, so make something out of it! Don't cheer for people getting arrested (something you'll be paying for by taxes for, hmm, 5 years per count, was it? Times the cost to keep a prisoner in jail?)... we KNOW we have the ability, right?
-- Nothing is black, nor is it white. If you think you've found something that isn't shades of grey, I can recommend a good optometrist. --