You make a very valid point, but none the less it is fundamentally flawed - all we have to do is change our own mindset as to resource and what it actually is - for example - our atmosphere will continue to be a swirling vortex for as long as the earth turns, and from this vortex we can harness energy - alternatively, the great nuclear reactor in the sky we all like to call the sun. Granted, both of these are finite, but on an intergalactic scale - meaning in your and my lifetimes we will see no significant degradation in quality of the resource, nor our children, nor our childrens children, etc ad nauseum.

But I won't get bogged down in semantics.

Truth be told, demos suck on the basis that you are (usually) given a finite amount of time to indulge yourself in the gameplay of a specific, lower skilled and ultimately boring level. It's the time limitation that gets to me the most. If demos were constructed around the principle of being able to play that level an infinite amount of times then eventually the developers would get around to persuading more people to buy the game itself. This is all part of wooing the consumer into wanting to own such a game - try, get used to the control systems, get bored of the one level, buy game, enjoy the remainder.

Applications on the other hand - some are simply vastly overpriced, and I don't know whether you could ever truly justify a statement like this but here goes - they deserve to be pirated..... There, I said it. It's out there now, on the table. I cannot physically see how any vast corporate standpoint could possible be, other than the potential return of investment for its major shareholders, that their application is "worth" in excess of €1500 per license. Unless, of course, its customer base is so specific and niche that they are expecting significantly lower ROI than if they had a mass marketable product.

Ultimately the solution would be to lower the overall price of applications and the like to tempt potential customers into buying them - but as Texrat said, this agian is another very Utopian viewpoint, full of self indulgence, and one that is unlikely to come true.

As long as software, media and similar items have a price tag associated with them, there will always be piracy. Marxist? Maybe. True though.