The idea that people will always take something for free rather than pay for it has been shown to be incorrect again and again. People pirate because:
1. they want something for free;
2. there isn't a legitimate source for the material; or
3. the pirated version is a superior product.
It's not wrong to say people pirate because they want something for free, but it's a child's level of reasoning to think that that's the only reason.
Gabe Newell's company, Valve, has made tons of money in Russia, not by using restrictive DRM, but by providing games to that market as quickly as possibly and by generally providing a better service than the pirates. This is in spite of the fact that Russia is viewed by a lot of game companies and movie producers as a complete trainwreck when it comes to piracy.
Here's an apposite quote from an interesting
interview:
Quote:
One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue. The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates. For example, Russia. You say, oh, we’re going to enter Russia, people say, you’re doomed, they’ll pirate everything in Russia. Russia now outside of Germany is our largest continental European market.
...But the point was, the people who are telling you that Russians pirate everything are the people who wait six months to localize their product into Russia. … So that, as far as we’re concerned, is asked and answered. It doesn’t take much in terms of providing a better service to make pirates a non-issue.
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This was the same issue for anime in the 90s. The only way to get decent translations of anime was to pirate it; the producers were taking months or years to translate it from Japanese and sell it in North America, all the while pirates were doing it in days. It didn't help those producers that the pirated versions often had superior translation work.