Derailment in 3, 2, 1 ...
The whole debate about piracy gets rather confusing when you acutally see who owns the rights to the games being sold. It's not uncommon to see big publishers sit on the rights to games and not allow the original artist access to the game/universe he helped to create.
Interplay still currently own the rights to the early Fallout games but after a lengthy legal battle they'll have to hand over the rights in 2013 to Bethesda. This doesn't however mean that the original team that was responsible for Fallout is getting any money from resales of Fallout 1/2/Tactics. To my knowledge the majority of Interplay staff were either made redundant or jumped ship.
The main reason to buy Fallout 1/2/Tactics now is to support your favourite online retailer like GOG or Steam. GOG in particular deserves that money.
I'm of the opinion that Copyright law needs a massive reformation as it currently does barely anything to protect the artist who made the product and instead protects the big publishers who can already afford to wipe their arse with the Shroud of Turin.
The entertainment industry is failing to keep up with a changing medium, one that allows almost any digital product to be copied and shared endlessly. To maintain a reason to exist, publishers and developers need to accept that piracy exist and stop creating a worse product than the pirates offer with shitty DRM, forced clients, stupidly high prices, price regions and all the other crap. Instead treating their paying consumers with loyality and respect like the majority of all the other industries in the world.
I'm hoping this sudden boom of intrest in Kickstarter and other methods of developers funding themselves without the need of publishers will take off. Hopefully the big publishers will all go jump ship to the consoles (like Ubisoft) untill those find a way to start sinking and they all drown in the ocean of consumer indifference.