Digital Piracy Is Evil: Well, on the one hand, it’s not called digital piracy (it’s called Unlawful Duplication & Conveyance, or Unlawful Derivation) and is a lesser crime than theft; and Imperial IP law is different and rather more generous, especially in re patents and discoverer’s licenses (but also in re creator’s moral rights); and DRM (and its cousins, Genetic Rights Management, Fabrication Rights Management, and Experience Rights Management) around here is different, belike.
On the other hand, IP crimes are prosecuted much more vigorously, even on the small scale, because it’s not the money, it’s the principle, belike. And at the far other end of the scale, any and all of the Galactic Trade Association, the Empire’s Market Liberty Oversight Directorate, Traders in Ideation, ICC, and the Intellectual Property Owner’s Association of the Empire have, well, mercenaries. Who are quite happy to make mass-pirated-good factories and pirated-data archives in non-sovereign space – and in sovereign space where the sovereignty in question does not feel like cooperating – explode, along with their owners, because those people do not respect their fellow sophont’s rights and they hate people like that.
If I had to guess, the flipside of this is probably that [i]there[/i], they’re not likely to charge you the local PPP-equivalent of $65 for a buggy, incomplete game that refuses to talk to the authentication servers 25% of the time, and the other 25% of the time, calls you a pirate and says you have to pay, then when you try, says you can’t because you already did 🙂
Of course, that’s not so much a difference of principle as it is of competence of implementation, and no self-respecting Imperial would stand for an implementation that bleedin’ incompetent, so.