What´s the point of the new copy protection?

[Turin]

Apparently menus randomly disappear on some turns in 3.06 if you play with a bad(pirated) CD-KEY.

I´m wondering what this should accomplish, because I see lots of negative effects of this copy protection.
Here are some that immediately come to mind:

1.Bad word of mouth.
People don´t know that it´s copyprotection, so people assume it´s a bug. That certainly will drive people off, who are thinking about buying the game, but hearing from their pirate friends that it´s a really buggy game. For example check out this thread on the somethingawful forums, where multiple people complain about the "bug", but are otherwise enthusiastic about the game:
http://forums.somethingawful.com/sho...2&pagenumber=4

2. Alienating semilegitimate users:
Unless it has changed recently, it can take quite a while for the copy to arrive when ordering from some publishers. Since many people aren´t very patient, it´s pretty likely that they will use a pirated copy until the real one arrives. Now guess what happens when they find out that the 55Euro game they just ordered has strange bugs/crashes.

3. Wasting programming time:
I don´t know much about programming, but implementing and checking that the copyprotection works correctly must take some time. With the huge list of bugs/requested features I´m pretty certain that the programming time could be better spent elsewhere for legitimate users.

4. Not trusting customers:
I think the dominions series is a pretty big success partly because the Illwinter guys are seen as nice guys, who passionately work to create their dream game and aren´t that interested in making money off it. Now if that perception changes and people see Illwinter as just another company out there to make money, I guess people will be less patient with UI issues/bad graphics etc, or less interested in making mods to enhance the game experience.

I can see two good effects though:

1. The developers can get the feeling of satisfaction that no pirate is enjoying their hard work.

2. There may be some guys, who have a pirated version, come to this forum to complain about the bug, get told that it´s because of their pirated version and then proceed to buy the game to get the benefit of the patches.


The reason I´m interested in this is that I´m a student of economics and I have focused on behavioral economics, which deals with issues like fairness/trust/reciprocity in an economic background. And given the results of the papers/experiments I have to read there regarding trust and reciprocity, I just can´t see how the new copy protection scheme makes sense.

For example why don´t you put at least an errormessage like Nagot gik fel:badcdkey after the error, so that the pirates know it´s not a bug and you don´t get the bad word of mouth effect?