[Olympus]

Back to the original question: Traphic Monitoring to replace DRM.

I despise all BigBrother solutions like Traphic Monitoring as this would remove any privacy although I should be considered innocent until proven guilty.
It is the same solution to build a monitoring device in all cars and automatically send speeding tickets when the system thinks you are speeding. Where to complain when you think the system is defective, what guarentees do I get that this information is not used by other parties (my insurance company, my employer, tweak the maximum limit to generate more speeding tickets ..)

And the fact that it is impossible to detect textual copyrighted material as I could be sending a document to my "professor" that includes some quotes it could raise an alarm.

What I see is another major difference with other shared files like music and movies: e-books are hardly reusable. An mp3 can easily be "consumed" without too much effort by the consumer: therefore mp3's are reused over and over again. An e-book is (mostly) one time experience: once read the consumer has no incentive to get an legitimate version as the he/she will just carry on to the next book. Therefore the library is such a good institution: people read one and return the resource to a public place where someone else can reuse the product which would otherwise be abandoned (stored on a shelf).

Warner/EMI just introduced an Internet "tax" collected by ISP's to download copyrighted material from a site. One might restart that not everybody is using/downloading MP3 - it's similar to the DVD/CD/Xerox-tax we pay for blank materials (in Holland this tax is collected however never distributed to the parties concerned as they can't agree which parties should get this money and how much).
How do we prevent many more parties to claim a tax because they suffer some sort of income decrease by illigitimate internet sharing?

Recently I discovered an abandoned e-book (Microsoft Lit) on my harddisk that I bought in 2002. I bought the book at amazon because it was book 2 of a series and I desperately wanted to know what happened to the characters.
Because it was in Microsofts Lit format all I had to do was: install Microsofts reader and activate the reader with my (abandoned) email address. This way the e-book is DRM-ed to the person that paid for the book and not the place/device that it's stored on.

So perhaps the business model should be: distribute part one as drm free on dark-net, websites whatever. As a writer you should be self confident that you are capable to get the readers attention so that they are more than willing to pay for a drm-ed - personalised version of the sequal.??? (just thinking out loud)