Whew this is a long winded thread...!
Here are a few points that formed while reading this far:
1 - It is their problem to fix, you don't have to! Seriously, if a company can not succeed in preventing their software from being pirated maybe they should leave the business. This is not some sort of negativism, it is simply a reality of the market. If your business model relies on people not copying your code you are in the wrong business. People will copy your program. Competition will steal code. Lawyers will sue. Deal with it or GTFO. Same goes for any other industry out there.
Cant make a safe airplane? How about making cooking utensils?
Can't secure your safe? You don't belong in banking.
2 - "Intellectual property" is not property, the very notion is wrong. If it was all these companies should have been paying royalties to the descendants of Babbage, Turing, Maxwell, Einstein and the like... Some company coming forth and implying that their intellectual property is somehow more important than these guys is preposterous.
EDIT: Even if we accepted the existence of value, this value only extends to the source code itself, not to the binary blob that the end user receives, which is not maintainable, can not be peer reviewed or checked against the existence of malicious code.
All that a software company can claim is that they provide a tool of limited usability, which is acceptable as long as the price is right.
The fact that the company employs 1000 people (half of them lawyers) to produce this tool is simply a manufacturing inefficiency and does not concern us in the slightest. If the same tool could be produced with three people the company would fire the rest of them without squinting. Therefore seeking moral grounds in "keeping the coders employed" is futile.
Hell, I wish somebody was concerned with keeping me employed but this is not how life works.
3 - Confusing human rights with companies. This seems to be an issue here. People seem to impart human qualities to companies. Companies obviously take advantage of that in their marketing by claiming that they are not "evil" but "good" or implying that they will be somehow "hurt" if you don't pay up, yearly.
A company is obviously an abstract construct and has no human qualities nor human rights. Confusion arises because companies employ people so most of us assume that companies somehow represent the people they employ. Nothing can be farther than the truth! Companies do not represent their employees. Employees do not represent the company. Sales matter, customers don't. So better to keep perspective there.