[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by stonetools

What's intersting to me is the numerous people on this wforum and elsewhere, who seem emotionally commmitted not only to the idea that casual sharing/piracy has little or no effect on digital sales, but even to the idea that it CAN have no effect, no matter how pervasive it is.

I am not such a person. I'm sure that unauthorised copies of digital files have some effect on sales. We do disagree on the likely scale of the effect.

Originally Posted by stonetools

Didn't say it was no problem, mate. I said it was no INSURMOUNTABLE problem. Indeed, its more of an inconvenience, more on the level of you losing your warranty on a Circuit City product when CC goes out of business.

Not so. Losing a warranty on a physical product is only a problem if the item breaks inside the warranty period. If your supplier a DRMed product ceases to support that DRM, you will lose access to that product when your currently authorised devices either break or need to be reinstalled. This is insurmountable. Well, unless you have sensibly removed the DRM first, of course. But that's a different discussion.

Originally Posted by stonetools

Now you guys argue that you can have your cake and eat it too: you can have no DRM with little increase in casual sharing and piracy and point to the music industry as an examnple of a successful No DRM regime. You cite a few indie writers and and some minor publishing houses offering no DRM content and say, " See? That can work for everyone". Well, the publishing industry is not convinced and I can't say as I blame 'em. I know that if I was betting my company on such evidence, I'd want more-a lot more.

You have acknowledged my point at last. The present of DRM or not on the digital files that are sold does not affect the amount of unauthorised copying to any significant extent.

This is, I would have thought, completely obvious. Because you didn't see that this was obvious, I have offered you facts and figures that support this obvious conclusion.

* You have evidence from an industry that's going through the same transition to digital, but a decade ahead of the publishing industry.
* You have evidence of a digital pioneer in the publishing industry, who has been producing DRM-free ebooks for over a decade, gets a few genre fiction titles into the NYT Best Seller lists, and has grown their business considerably over the past decade.
* You have the evidence of other leading-edge publishers switching over to DRM free digital files over the past few years, and also seeing overall sales increase.

What more evidence do you need?