Hey MatYada,
Sorry to hear about your company's losses.
Bucks, Quick or Otherwise
If its any consolation, I just got back to Singapore after staying in US for 3~4yrs. I have not visited some of the favorite computer haunts in Singapore, but before I left Singapore, I know that a whole assortment of software, vcd and music (100s of mp3s "mastered" into a remix cd!) pirates hawk their goods openly in these places. Trust me, these pirates are there for the buck, quick or otherwise. Sure, they use physical medium to sell their goods, but it does not change the way they take advantage of lossless digital duplication that is available easily.
Broadband
To be on the same page, I think Singapore just turned developed nation a few years back and since 1998/99, I've enjoyed broadband internet access. Not sure if you were referring to low internet bandwidth, but if you were, Singapore definitely had broadband while piracy was rampant.
Today in China (BeiJing, ShenZhen, HongKong), Taiwan, Malaysia etc, you can easily have broadband internet access, but these pirates still churn out the same software, video and music goods, except faster, since technology has improved by leaps and bounds.
The thing is that the average joe in these countries do not have the savvy to use that CD or DVD writer to burn an iso, but has enough streetwise to choose to buy a "discounted" pirate CD/DVD.
Pure Digital
I get a feeling we might be splitting hairs going into "purely digital forms of piracy"
... but just for the sake of consistency, ok, so we cannot make cash from it. So in that same line, pure digital forms of anything cannot be consumed by us. MP3s need to be decoded, piped through the OS, to the hardware drivers as digital data and converted through some DAC on the soundchip and into analog signals that reach our ears as sound. Software in pure digital forms, is not usable since any form of representation is analog. The display itself, if not LCD, is almost pure analog. LCDs are digital, but the light that is transmitted is analog.
... so, ya I doubt anyone can make cash from pure digital forms of piracy.
And as far as online piracy is concerned, I believe I read an article about how DVD pirates are making use of broadband to pipe DVD ISOs from US to their worldwide distro channels for duplication into physical DVDs. These DVDs will end up in the hands of the average joe who are either clueless about burning ISOs, or their source, or just want to pay a few bucks for the movie instead of spending time searching, downloading and burning the movie. Of cos, I must say, I agree with you, that is not pure digital piracy, but they are definitely benefiting from the online part.
French Laws
I was just reading the article about the French Laws passed on Tuesday. I must profess my disdain for content owners/distro who are in cahoots with hardware vendors with their run-only-on-my-brand-machine-DRM.
To be fair, MS' Play-For-Sure seemed honest enough, though I can only imagine the politics behind the scenes with Apple on having a common DRM. But at least this PFS approach (I almost called it a solution) attempts to give end-consumers just that: The ability to know that a device will play the audio file he paid for. It's not as open as plain mp3, but its a compromise.
Let's hope together that more governments awaken to this and enforce such a "Play-Everywhere" DRM approach across the board.
EDIT: hey, I think it should work something like SSL, where the content (in html for web) is separate from the encryption. hehe ... since apache is so light and efficient, maybe DAPs should start embedding apaches into it and use SSL or something huh?