Jailbreaking / Modding, Opinions?

There are a lot of very smart people out there today, and thanks to this mysterious and incomprehensible connection between your screen and mine we are able to interact with them. Among those people are those known as "hackers" or "modders" and I mean the actual people who design them, not the thousands of people who use them. Companies like Sony are starting to have these raging campaigns against these people on the grounds that they're losing money to the people who pirate using these mods. On one hand I agree, if I were in their position, I would be angry too, but since I am also a consumer, one with minimal funds mind you, I am also on the opposing side. I think it's safe to assume, now with Bittorrent and the such running rampant, that downloading these games is now comparable to downloading music.

I've heard both sides of the argument. I've heard the companies complain that they're losing money and that the industry is going under, and I've heard from consumers that downloading is safe because they wouldn't have been able to afford the games anyway, so no sale is lost. I understand it's an argument that's been beaten to death a million times, so there's really nothing I can say about it to add any new insight. But does all modding have to really be bad?

I've seen a lot of home-brew applications on my Wii and on my PSP that did things that they were never intended to be able to do. They're able to emulate old PC games like Doom, and they're able to become things like Alarm Clocks and Torrent Clients, Game emulators for previous systems, the list goes on. If the companies didn't fight the modding community so harshly and actually embraced it, couldn't they work together to create better devices with more accessibility?

Open Source is the way to the future I believe, that's why browsers like Firefox are so great, and even other programs like Open Office, Operating Systems like Ubuntu (Which I use on my Sony Vaio laptop, It's great, user friendly, and 100% free), Audio recording and editing with Audacity, Photo manipulation with Gimp, the list totally goes on and on. People really need to start working together in every way possible to have as much innovation as we can. I believe that's how we can get to the technological future that we see in movies.