I'll probably get dog-piled for this, but here goes anyway:
First, I absolutely agree that any piracy is totally immoral and wrong. Not defending or justifying piracy whatsoever. HOWEVER, the goal of the business should not be to shift things into an us/them scenario. The more a business attempts to moralize and drive a divide between customers and pirates, the more the pirates will turn it into a war against the people "looking down their noses" at the pirates, the more diligently the pirates will devote themselves to pirating everything you release. What I'm saying is you can complain about pirates all day long and blame all your problems on them, but that won't put food on your table or keep your people employed. To the contrary, more often than that it just makes things worse, even if what the business is saying is completely true.
The other thing that needs to be said is that 1 pirated copy ≠ 1 lost sale, no matter who would try to have you believe otherwise. Most pirates never would have purchased the product either way. Actually in some cases piracy can even be a good thing because if the product is good, it's effectively free marketing. Word gets out to more potentially paying customers who never would have heard about your product otherwise. What is better for a business, 100 sales, OR 110 sales and 1,000,000 pirated copies, where 20 of the legit sales came from people who otherwise wouldn't have heard about the product if not for pirates making it popular by talking about it?
Piracy also has a cost to the user. There's a good chance anything pirated you get will contain computer-destroying malware. You often have to go to the ends of the internet's sketchiest places to find it, those places themselves also often full of malware. A lot of users would rather pay for the real deal and get the "better service" of a clean and direct software delivery platform. Steam recognized this years ago and they built their entire business on this principal, and now they're a multi-billion dollar business, far and away the best platform for video games in their industry to the tune of commanding 74-75% global market share. People would rather pay for a game on Steam than pirate it for free because the user experience is better than piracy.
In a perfect world, piracy would not exist. I am not defending it, just trying to shed some light on things. Publicly gnashing your teeth at it won't make it go away, so you might as well try to fully understand it so you can attack it and defend against it with greatest efficiency. You're free to write it off completely and say "well pirates are just evil terrible people who I am better than" but again, that won't put food on your table or keep butts in seats at the studio.
So what can you do, right now, to help stop the piracy? Here's an idea. If I was Cliff, I'd release my own special "pirated" version of the software that would work fine for about [random number of minutes] after initial launch, but then all the functionality would break over the course of another [random number of minutes], after which the sound would garble up and quit working. Do not explain that it's a pirated copy, do not throw a middle finger at the pirate. No gotcha moments. Instead, let the pirate draw the conclusion that "the pirated version" of the software "must not have been pirated right" and that they should instead get the real thing if they want it to work. Flood this version all over the place to obfuscate the actual pirated version so pirates have a higher chance of getting the "special" version. This effectively manipulates the market such that purchasing the legitimate version will guarantee a vastly superior experience vs the experience of trying to find a "working" pirated version by scouring through the worst places on the internet.
