This morning I had the pleasure of reading PC gamer, and as I was flipping through I noticed on article on the safegaurds that publishers are putting on games to prevent pirating.  As it turns out, these programs not only protect against piracy but they also protect against legitimate users.  Personally, I've never had this problem, but according to the editor these programs can really screw up you system ( he mentioned a program called StarForce specifically).  It seems to me that these bugs in protective software might end up costing the gaming industry more in lost sales than the actual piracy itself.  Developers really need to work out the problems with this kind of thing before they start losing their consumers.

Also in this article, they had a really cool anti-piracy program that actually let the pirate play the game, but slowly degraded the experience.  If the pirate was a hot shot sniper, the game's protection would slowly deteriorate his accuracy until his ability was totally neutralized.  Anyway, thought that was pretty cool.