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The problem with these kinds of discussions, IMO, is that there isn't one solution that works for all writers. There is a huge difference between, say, James Patterson or Stieg Larsson on the one hand, and an average author with sales of 3-4,000 books on the other.
As Cory Doctorow point out, for most authors, the biggest danger is obscurity, not someone stealing your work. What these authors need to do is whatever it takes to get their book in front of the most potential readers. Which means making it as easy as possible for them to see it and get it - no DRM, available at a lot of places, some free copies. Sure, some people will read your book without paying for it, but if they never heard of the book, they wouldn't have paid for it either. According to this very plausible theory, the losses you will have due to no DRM are less than the gains you will get due to increased availability due to no DRM.
However, I don't think that this theory really works for authors who are not obscure - George R.R. Martin, Nora Roberts, Lee Child, etc. Authors who you can comfortably predict a year in advance that their next book will be a NY Times bestseller. These authors don't really need more exposure, and - particularly because their books are in demand - they are likely to suffer some actual sales losses due to casual sharing. (As opposed to losses from people who specifically look for their books on the darknet, which are probably difficult to avoid). How great these losses might be is hard to say, although I can imagine them being substantial. (It's hard to quantify how substantial - but I think a reasonable, somewhat conservative number might be something like 5% of actual sales lost - which is 50,000 sales for a million seller, and equates to real money).
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