"Yes, we've got to find solutions," Moore said. "We absolutely should crack down on piracy. People put a lot of blood, sweat and tears into their content and deserve to get paid for it. It's absolutely wrong, it is stealing."

Moore also signaled that the experiences of music publishers in suing downloaders haven't gone unnoticed by their peers in the gaming industry.

"If we learned anything from the music business, they just don't win any friends by suing their consumers," he observed. "Speaking personally, I think our industry does not want to fall foul of what happened with music."

Peter Moore, president at EA Sports. Source: EA Sports

Bravo. So what's the solution? Proprietary content-delivery platforms like Valve's Steam, Microsoft's Xbox Live and so on have long been proposed as viable ways of staving off piracy without dramatically impacting users' rights and behavior.

But other gaming industry luminaries suggest a different avenue: Since after the PC hardware manufacturers are complicit in piracy, let's go after them.

Er, what?

That's right: In an interview with Gamesindustry.biz, id Software CEO Todd Hollenshead let loose on the hardware industry -- those hitherto unknown partners in crime with illegal downloaders.

"There's been this dirty little secret among hardware manufacturers, which is that the perception of free content - even if you're supposed to pay for it on PCs - is some sort hidden benefit that you get when you buy a PC, like a right to download music for free or a right to download pirated movies and games."

I think that if you went in and could see what's going on in their minds, though they may never say that stuff and I'm not saying there's some conspiracy or something like that -- but I think the thing is they realize that trading content, copyrighted or not, is an expected benefit of owning a computer.

And I think that just based on their actions...what they say is one thing, but what they do is another. When it comes into debates about whether peer-to-peer file-sharing networks that by-and-large have the vast majority, I'm talking 99 per cent of the content is illicitly trading copyrighted property, they'll come out on the side of the 1 per cent of the user doing it for legitimate benefit. You can make philosophical arguments that are difficult to debate, but at the same time you're just sort of ignoring the enormity of the problem.

I urge you to read the entire interview. Hollenshead's clearly upset. But is fingering one's partners as complicit in the crime really the answer?

Hm. Sponsors for id's Quakecon event last week included AMD, Intel, Dell, Cisco/Linksys, Logitech, Texas Instruments and plenty of others. I wonder how they feel about all of this. Swell, I bet!