I find it ironic the state of piracy changes to the demands of the consumer more often than the companies that oppose it.

Take software piracy from about a decade ago, before broadband, fat bandwidth and high capacity storage made their way into the average home. If you wanted to buy a bogus copy of Windows 98, or several other popular applications, you could nearly always find it on CD at your local Sunday trading markets or from a dubious vendor in a foriegn country while you were on holiday.

Back then these physical software pirates made royal amounts of money from selling said wares, but recently that has all changed. P2P is the new DVD. TorrentFreak has a brief insight with one of these notorious physical software pirates.

Tony: "The profit was amazing back then" he recalls "We were getting 25 pounds ($48) for a couple of PSX games and 15 pounds ($29) for a single CDR with the latest utilities on it. We couldn't make them fast enough...After 3 hours we were cleared out and on our way home, always with huge amounts of money."

That was then and this is now. Widespread broadband take-up combined with any P2P application (Limewire, Bearshare, Bitlord etc...) has significantly reduced the demand for content (legal and illegal) on a physical medium such as a CD or DVD.

"...CD's that were once treated like gold are now considered low capacity drink coasters..."

I can even testify to this fact. The monthly APC magazine I subscribe to comes with a Cover CD (or DVD) every issue, which I promptly toss in the bin without even glancing at its contents. Even if the disc contained something I wanted, I prefer to download it from the developer's web site knowing I will be getting the latest version quickly and without a thought towards my disc space.

During the old dial-up days Cover CD's that were once treated like gold are now considered low capacity drink coasters with qualities less desirable than that of an AOL CD.

But with the RIAA and MPAA suing everybody with a computer and a heartbeat (and sometimes people without a computer or without a heartbeat), keep your eyes open because we may even see these shady software dealers popping up at the markets once again.

As CD's are slowly becoming an endangered species like the humble Floppy Disc before them, the local market warez peddler will probably be armed with BlueRay instead.