As I type this, CEO Brad Wardell and crew are working frantically, round the clock, to save the botched launch of their new online-angled real-time strategy game, . At the same time, four of the whiz-kids running The Pirate Bay ($3.6 million USD) for copyright infringement. Now whether you think they're culpable or just a bunch of naive patsies, there's something frighteningly ironic about that.

Here's the clincher: Stardock didn't botch Demigod's launch, a bunch of illegal copies of the game did. According to Wardell, out of approximately 120,000 customers connected to their Demigod server farm, only about 18,000 are legitimate purchasers. The other 102,000? Thieves, aka black hats, aka bad guys, aka selfish entitlement-frenzied killjoys, aka pirates. Or "warez users," to quote Brad, who's old enough to remember when that term was more in vogue.