I have never said a word about anarchy.
Baen Books is a publisher who makes a substantial share of their profits (I've heard in the 30%+ range, but have no documentation) from the sales of ebooks. DRM-free ebooks.
I don't know what percentage of David Weber's income is e- versus p-. Given how successful Baen (his publisher) has been at monetizing ebooks, however, I doubt if he's worried about his future.
Now, as to supporting laws that protect the rights of others ... first of all, we have to define "rights". We'll need a bigger thread.
With regard to laws that protect the legislatively-granted privileges of others, we're looking at three things: 1) What exactly we're trying to protect, 2) Whether such laws are fair, and 3) Whether such laws are effective.
Starting with 1): Just what
do you want those laws to do? Do you want them to secure a guaranteed income for authors? Do you want them to make sure that nobody ever reads your book without giving you money? Do you want them to do something different? A major source of problems with laws (and with governments) comes down to the passing of laws without fully considering what they are trying to accomplish. As a random example, it's illegal to play computer games in Greece (or it was; I haven't checked on it lately). I couldn't tell you what the original problem was. The manifestation of that problem was people spending their money gambling (video poker, etc.). The government decided to deal with the problem by outlawing all mechanical or electronic gaming devices. As far as anyone can tell, they weren't
really trying to get net cafe owners arrested for allowing people to play chess online -- but that's what happened. They didn't think it through, and ended up with a mess.
Then there's 2) regarding whether any given law is fair. For an extreme example, a law saying that everyone else has to get off the road if I want to drive would certainly be effective in protecting me from the idiots who populate the local roads, but not very fair to everyone else. It's a matter of balance. Looking at the Greek game law, even if it shut down the illegal gambling dens (though given the resilience of such businesses, that's doubtful) it wasn't fair to the owners of perfectly legitimate businesses who were also closed down, people who were arrested for playing games or allowing them to be played, tourists who were threatened with having their handheld games, even their phones, confiscated by customs, and so on. It was a case of calling in an airstrike on a mouse. Yeah, you'll get the mouse, but the collateral damage is messy.
Finally we have 3), whether such laws are effective. The usual example is Prohibition in the US. It not only didn't work, but it spawned more problems (corruption on a massive scale, the explosive growth of organized crime, etc.) than it solved. As someone pointed out above, there are plenty of copies of J.K. Rowling's books available on the darknet, despite the fact that no legitimate electronic copies have ever been produced. The USSR, which tried registering and licensing every photocopy machine, every mimeograph, in their attempt to control samizdat publication, failed. They could, and did, imprison people in the gulags of Siberia for breaking those laws, and yet the laws were broken just the same.
So what exactly
are you trying to protect?
How do you think it can be accomplished fairly?
Why do you think that method will work?
I'll bring up once again the example of the "losses" the BSA (that's the Business Software Alliance, not the Boy Scouts of America) claims that software companies are suffering due to illicit copying. They make their estimates based on the idea that every teenage warez d00d with a cracked copy of Photoshop CS5 would have bought that software at full retail price if he did not have access to it. That is obviously false, at least to everyone but BSA lawyers. If he didn't have Photoshop to put stupid captions on his facebook pics, he'd have used Windows Paint; he wouldn't have gone out and spent over a thousand dollars, or even a hundred dollars, or most likely even ten dollars, to do it. It's not a lost sale if it was never going to be a sale at all, and it's not lost money if that money doesn't actually exist (you're not losing a $1000 sale from a kid who only has $5 to his name). The same thing is true of ebooks. Joe Schmoe who grabs a bundle of 3,000 books off some torrent somewhere is not costing publishers $84,000. Why not? Because he would not have bought each and every one of those 3,000 books at their $28 hardback price if he didn't get them from the darknet. He might have bought a few paperbacks. Maybe used ones. He's not even going to read most of them (at 1 book a week, that's over 50 years of reading!). He downloaded the whole bloody zip because it was there; he really wants to read two or three of the books, maybe even a dozen, not thousands. So that $84,000 "lost sales" really works out to maybe ... $84. 1/10 of 1% of what it's claimed to be.
Perhaps you imagine a world in which every ebook is locked to the purchaser's DNA. Nobody could read a word of your books without giving you money. Wouldn't that be great? Well ... a while back, I was browsing the $1 charity book bin at my local supermarket, and I found a mystery novel that looked interesting. So I donated a buck to the charity of the month and snagged it. I liked it so much that I bought every other book in the series, and I'm waiting for the next one to come out this fall. In a world of DRM-locked ebooks, that never would have happened.
Remember that everything you do to restrict access to books discourages reading. The more expensive, inconvenient, and restrictive reading becomes, the fewer people will read. Further, they will raise fewer readers. Music, as a counter-example, is all around us. How many artists have you discovered because you heard a song on the radio, for example? You can't avoid it. But books don't play in front of our eyes without our active involvement. Readers don't just happen; they're raised and encouraged by other readers. So discouraging reading chokes off the market for books. There is another way in which the world has changed: 100 years ago, books were not only the primary, but nearly the only, form of canned entertainment. Today, they're competing with music, TV, movies, computer games, the Web, etc. Restricting access to books -- especially among the young, because the reading habit is usually formed early or not at all -- just makes those other forms of entertainment all the more attractive.
Here's something to think about. Imagine two possible scenarios regarding selling your books (e- or p-, it doesn't matter):
A) Every copy of every book is locked, by advanced handwavium-based technology, to a single individual and a single use. Those books sell for $5 each, and you sell 20,000 books.
B) Books are much the same as they are today. Any number of people can read a book, it could be resold, given away, whatever. Those books sell for $10 each, and you sell 10,000 books. Another 30,000 people read borrowed, resold, or otherwise transferred books.
Which scenario would you prefer, and why?
Now look back at your answer in light of my points 1-3 above, and think about what it is that you really want to do.