Turns out Microsoft were the real pirates of silicon valley all along.

It wasn't actually piracy, so much as ripping off customers.

What they were selling was copies of the shareware demo version of doom, which was supposed to be free. When id found out, they sold them empty boxes to put the shareware in and keep selling it.

If people bought the demo and liked the game, they would buy the full version from id by mail order.

Kinda shady tbh.

Back then internet wasn't freely available. While I don't know the situation in Taiwan back then, but it getting it on a floppie might have been the easiest way. A physical thing that still cost money and time to write. Selling cheap to the pirates still made them some money, the pirates saved time spent writing drives, and they could make sure the customers got official boxes with correct contact information on.

Where I come from you went and bought PC magazines bundled with floppies and later CD that had a demos and shareware products on. The magazine was often not the interesting thing in the bundle. So calling it ripping off is a bit harsh, the pirates were providing a service. Even with access to the internet, surfing the web did not work the same as it do today. Without an address it could be hard to find pages.

The article has the answers you seek.

The thing being sold by the pirates was a free demo of the game that they didn't have the infrastructure to properly distribute in some places. Letting the pirates sell it drummed up interest for the full game that they were selling.

There were probably plenty of other ways they could have done this without letting people be scammed but this was likely just the easiest.