A new age and mentality has formed over the years, and that is “why should I pay for it when I can get it for free?”

It’s a mentality that has made a significant dent in the film, music and PC game markets through P2P sites such as BitTorrent.

One of the examples used is the independently released game “World of Goo,” where the developers reported record losses and eventually filed for bankruptcy, all while claiming that their game was pirated a significant number of times.

Gabe Newell, president of prestigious game developing house Valve, has taken a philosophy towards Digital Rights Management (DRM) and piracy that goes against other companies such as Electronic Arts, with the only real copy protection on their games being an online registration with the digital distribution service, Steam.

He’s even adopted the mantra that “rampant piracy is just unserved customers.”

That’s good for Valve, but “World of Goo” was distributed through Steam, his own service, wherein it was then pirated to oblivion. So even though it isn’t much of an issue for Valve itself, smaller developers feel the impact.

Couldn’t some kind of copy protection on “World of Goo” have made a dent on the number of files put onto torrent sites?

iTunes has had DRM from the beginning of time, and has just recently given customers the option of stripping away that DRM. A few argue that it’s insane to have to pay to have DRM stripped from songs they have already paid for in order to play it on a non “pod” MP3 player.

If you are buying songs from iTunes, then why are you playing it on a player that Apple isn’t making in the first place? Granted iTunes has a massive selection, but other services such as Amazon’s DRM-free music store are catching up with the long time provider of music.

Going back to PC games, the way the market works is that a new game has two weeks to make a significant profit before consumers move on to the next big release.

DRM can’t keep the game from getting cracked and put online, but it can delay that process to allow the game to have its two weeks of profits.

DRM isn’t a perfect solution to piracy, but I would rather we at least try and stem it as opposed to lying down and letting them have their way.