You can characterize it as you wish, but the optimal amount of piracy is not zero, it's whatever amount costs more to quash than you will gain in revenue from q

You can characterize it as you wish, but the optimal amount of piracy is not zero, it's whatever amount costs more to quash than you will gain in revenue from quashing it. For many endeavors, this is quite a large amount of piracy, perhaps even larger in numbers than legitimate acquisition. For other endeavors, the balance lies somewhere that feels more favorable to the creator. There are many ways to find roughly where this line is, and DRM can be part of an effective scheme, but it can also be (and usually is) a crutch that obfuscates the line instead. Valve is not a charity and tolerating some piracy pragmatically is not equivalent to wanting a free-for-all. What's good for the consumer can still be good for the creator and Steam has proved that. It doesn't need to meet some purity test.