An update to the Galactic Civilizations II: Dread Lords Website clarifies to Digg the illogic of their inference that Stardock wants Galactic Civilizations II pirated based on the decision to not include copy protection. They also bring to light a rather startling bit of tit-for-tat over all this on the GalCiv2 forums:

For example, we were quite disturbed to discover that the company that makes Starforce provided a working URL to a list of pirated GalCiv II torrents. I'm not sure whether what they did was illegal or not, but it's troubling nevertheless and was totally unnecessary.

All software is pirated, there's no way around it. We've been making software for over 10 years. We don't like our software being pirated. Like I said, every lost sales has an impact on us. But there are other ways to reduce it than through draconian copy protection systems.

Incidentally, the site that Starforce's forum admin linked to "prove" how much our software was being pirated we visited, followed the instructions on the site to get our game removed and the links were removed within a couple of hours. We'll continue to follow-up with them.