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JohnClif, thank you for engaging us in this discussion -- this is an important topic, and I for one am glad you are here to represent your POV.

Originally Posted by JohnClif

It's not about throttling the new medium, it's about ensuring that authors get paid at least as much under the new system as they did the old system.

This is, by definition, what I mean by "maintaining the status quo". A rhetorical sentence to illustrate the silliness: "It's not about throttling the new method of transportation, it's about ensuring horse-carriage manufacturers get paid at least as much under the new system as they did the old system."

Why must the new system ensure this?

What it also may do is remove the incentive for those people.

Yes, it may do that. OTOH, it may also create incentives for a myriad others, who would never have seriously thought about publishing, or who the old system would have shunned, to do so.

It may turn out that there are brilliant new business models to be explored that create much greater incentives for authors. But it will be hard to find out if we are having artificial restrictions placed on the medium in order to maintain the old business model.

To illustrate: imagine a world in which books carry advertising. (A sacrilege, I know; please bare with me.) Authors are compensated by the amount of times their works are read, not by copy sold. In this scenario, it is in the author's best interest to have as many copies out in the world, regardless of whether they are paid for or not. This is a model that is clearly hurt by the current situation, in which all the devices employ a different proprietary format, and in which the copying of books is actively discouraged.

FWIW, I much prefer the current business model -- I'd hate to have ads peppered through my reading. The point is that DRM limitations are a way of imposing the old business model on a medium that offers very different challenges and opportunities. Ebooks are being hurt by the complexity imposed by DRM and are probably not going to be a big market until this complexity goes away.

What makes capitalism work over pure socialism/communism is the ability for people to be compensated in proportion to the quality and quantity of work they produce as judged by the market.

It's interesting that you should mention this. I happen to think that in this case, DRM represents the totalitarian end of the spectrum; imposing artificial limitations on markets is a hallmark of totalitarian forms of government. Think, what side of this argument would Thomas Jefferson advocate?

The crux of the problem is that -- to use a tired, old metaphor -- authors have been selling bottles, not wine. Now we get to find out what the market is willing to pay for the wine itself, sans bottles.

Microsoft

I'm not gonna go near this... suffice it to say this company is not a model of "fairness", by any definition of the word, and an example of the dangers of monopolistic platform control to free markets.