I find these piracy debates really interesting. There's a lot in play here and I'd hope that as developers and gamers we can recognize that this issue is not a black white moral issue. 

Piracy is here to stay and demonizing people for it doesn't help anyone. The problem we are running into is a paradigm shift in the way we think about intellectual property. Before the digital era intellectual property was much harder to duplicate. With digital media its designed to be easy to copy - that's the whole point if digitizing it - because one you can copy it ad infinitium you can do so much more with it. Information in now effectively free to transmit and almost free to store it is inevitable that information (and digital media as a subset of information) is decommoditized. Movies music and games are not chairs and hammers. One is as good as having a million and sharing them doesn't require you to give away yours. The fact of the matter is you can't stop piracy but we can accept it as a reality and adapt to it. 

We are on the frontier of the information age - where information and digital media is everywhere and freely available. This is very different from the information scarce world we are emerging from. Now anyone can possess information - its just a matter of copying it which takes a few seconds. Its not a matter of owning the information - because anyone can posses just about any collection of bits they want - its about the ability to discover relevant information. That's the genius behind Google - their ads are relevant to your searches. In terms of digital media, relevancy is almost synonymous with quality. The reason piracy of digital media is to rampant is that consumers are trying to maximise the quality of the content they interact with while minimising the costs they incur to find it. They incur the costs of time and energy in the search process - so what they will pay for is services that either ensure content quality and diversity OR services that help them interact with digital media in better ways. 

The point is we don't pay for the bits of information anymore. We don't pay for the songs, movies or games because they are digitized - they are free now - weather the content creators like it or not. We pay for experiences, (that can't be digitized, yet), we pay for quality (which is subjective and subject to individual preference and experience) and finally we pay for services that extend the context and add meaning to the bits. 

In the context of SOASE:

I did not pay for Sins v1. I payed for the upgrades to the game and access to the beta of entrenchment. I payed for the right to participate in the beta of the expansion, access to online players and I payed for better AI to play against. I payed for sins because I was absolutely sure the game was worth every penny of the asking price because I had played it for 40 hours over the course of 3 months with my roommates. 

The truth of the matter is that bit-torent is probably the reason sins made it as far as it has and the gamers bill of rights philosophy that Ironclad has embraced only made pirated copies that much simpler to distribute and use. Peer to peer is how people find out about good games to play and its often how people get their hands on them as well. The question now is how to convert those pirates to customers. A good number of pirates are your early adopters and product evangelists who have immense value as product testers and marketing assets. 

My point is that demonising piracy gets us no where. Yes the Ironclad team deserves to be payed for the quality work that they do. Absolutely. There is no question that they deserve to make money from the fruit of their labor. But its time to realize we, as a digital society, are not in Kansas anymore. The nature of things has fundamentally changed. I sincerely hope that Ironclad can capitalize on this new paradigm because they do such fantastic work. It would be a shame if the talent at Ironclad faded into obscurity because they failed to recognise the environment they were in and didn't recognise the opportunity before them or worse bit the hand that feeds them.