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Just a quick quibble: the proper term is "restriction", not "protection". We don't need to let the publishers choose our vocabulary for us. And we don't need to have our books "protected" from ourselves.
As for buying DRM-free ebooks from "regular" publishers: while you can't get that one, that doesn't mean you can't get any books without DRM. I bought two last night from Baen. They're out there, and it's worth not only buying their books but telling them why you bought their books.
As for your question, Lene: I have here on my desk a pbook which is about a hundred years old (it's an old Tom Swift book). In the time since that book was published, we have seen two world wars and numerous smaller ones, flight, space travel, widespread electrification, sound movies, radio, television, computers, mobile phones, email, plastics, and many, many other technologies. About the only things I can see on my desk that would have been available to Tom are the wooden bookstand and the pencil in my pencil jar -- and I have some doubts about their paint. Even the fountain pen in front of me is made of modern plastics. Yet I can read that book. Were it a DRM-restricted ebook, I could not. The author is dead, the publisher is out of business, the copyright expired years ago (it was back when "limited" didn't mean "hundreds of years"). If there had been some kind of authentication server required to read it, or if it had been locked to a single device, it would be an inert file. My ebook reader won't survive a hundred years, and there's nobody left to run an authentication server for the book, so if DRM-locked, it would be useless. That's equally true over the short term: We've seen questions on MobileRead from people who bought ebooks that were subsequently restricted in some way, and now can't access and read the books they bought and paid for. That doesn't begin to cover the people who bought different devices, or the "wrong" format, or any of the other problems.
The purpose of DRM is to limit us to making the least possible use of our purchase that we will endure. I choose not to endure that. There means not buying DRM-locked books, period, to vote with my wallet, however tiny it may be. Stripping DRM is easy, from my point of view anyway, but it would still be seen as a DRM-accepted sale by the publisher. I have no problem with the legality of it, but I have a big problem with voting in favor of DRM. So I simply won't.
DRM limits our ability to make legal use of items we legally purchased (would you buy a cupholder you were only allowed to use in one car?). All the publishers' ... supporters ... equating reading books to breaking into houses won't change that.
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