I share the pain this guy experiences. I had Age of Empires 3 which would not run on my machine, period, because it didn't recognize the CD Rom driver and, as Microsoft explained, it might be a 'virtual' CD ROM and that would violate the terms of service. And even though it wasn't and didn't I could never run their software on that machine.

Thus the who piracy economic argument is broken in three ways:

1) Folks who pirate software won't pay full price, sometimes they won't pay any price. So the economic 'loss' from piracy is either '0' or the area under the curve described by units pirated vs actual purchase price.

The loss is 0 if you use the reasoning that if there were perfect piracy prevention, none of these people would have paid for the retail version.

2) The cost of protection adds additional production costs (printing unique product code stickers and adding them) adding additional steps to boxing/shipping, adding additional activation software and its testing.

3) The additional cost of support when legitimate users like this guy call support to have a human you're paying anywhere between 10 and 25/hr to 'solve' this persons install/operation problems.

Folks who have done the math, with real numbers (and Lotus comes to mind), determine that they earn more money by not including DRM on the product. When Lotus first announced they were removing DRM from their 1-2-3 product they mentioned that nothing they had done had ever slowed down the availability of pirated versions but had added additional support burdens every time.