"However, I am going to be the bold and say, with pirates at their peak, it's time for them to step down. They're done. We've been saturated. Anything more and we'll become sick of them, like when a good song is overplayed on the radio. Pirates need to go out in a blaze of glory. This will likely happen during the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie: One more look at staggering Johnny Depp with lots of eyeliner, and then, boom - stick a cutlass in them; they're done."

Mur Lafferty posits that Pirates, as a cultural tour de force, are done.

"'Then, Bejeweled shipped, and my girlfriend at the time, Brooke Pannell, and I got addicted. She deserves a credit on Puzzle Pirates for beating me at Super Puzzle Fighter at the dime arcade on our third date.' On one particular day, 'I left her playing on the laptop in bed, and came back five hours later. She was still playing. The pieces fell together; bling bling!'"

Shannon Drake speaks to Three Rings' Daniel James.

"Then, one day the Pirate Lord disappeared. When we got to his house, one neighbor said he had stuffed everything (family and furniture) into a truck the week before and never came back. The last game he copied us was the first CD game I had: Rebel Assault. Times were changing."

Leonardo Pose is a Third World Pirate.

"After sailing the barren waters of roleplaying for a decade or more, John has finally found in online gaming a sheltering, if not yet safe, harbor: 'This is the best job I've ever had. While the last four-plus years were long ones, I've learned so much I don't regret a single day. I am glad every day to work on a project like this: different genre, different gameplay, different art direction and stable, independent financing.
'On the other hand, it would be great if my next project didn't take four years!'
Allen Varney speaks to Flying Labs' John Tynes.

"After hearing about EMI's decision, the PFF's James DeLong, a longtime advocate of using DRM to weed out 'free riders' from not paying, wrote, 'If the new format quickly turns up on the P2P sites, and if sales start off high and then fade away as the songs spread virally from iPod to iPod, then we will have learned something.' This, of course, is silly."

Tom Rhodes has been on both sides of the DRM debate. He thinks piracy sucks, and DRM is just as bad.