[Harmon]

[QUOTE=Steven Lyle Jordan;1946447]

For instance, the sharing item is something that was done with printed books, but that does not have to be a component of ebooks, being that ebooks aren't physical products.

That's certainly logical, but it doesn't seem to be the way people think about ebooks. The notion of "passing the book along" seems to still exist in the ebook world - the only new thing being, perhaps, time compression, to the point where several people are reading the "same" ebook at the same time.

I think that this does result, to some extent, from the legacy of paperbook reading, but I also think that it is somehow related to the way several people can use the same copy of a computer program at the same time.

Other items listed are too open to interpretation to be useful parameters (How much is "reasonable" to you? How much "hassle" is too much for you?).

That goes off on the wrong tangent. The questions are legitimate, but irrelevant to the point that people do make judgments involving reasonableness and the degree of hassle, and these judgements impact their behavior. The easier the legitimate market is to use, and the lower the prices, the less the black market will be used.

These qualities cannot be listed as some kind of "minimum requirement" to avoid piracy, since too many of the points are too nebulous, and essentially leave anyone open to declare a right to piracy if any one of these items doesn't satisfy them sufficiently ("the book was fifty cents too much... I'm stealing it").

I think that this has more to do with approaching the issue from different viewpoints. Sort of like the difference between "descriptivists" and "prescriptionists" in using language.

I'm merely saying that publishers who fail to consider and react to these expectations will find that the extent of piracy of their books is greater than it otherwise would be.

The list of elements that satisfy the majority of the public must be more concrete, and the rest of the public should be made to understand that this applies to everyone. If extra dispensations can't be made for an individual, that's great; but it shouldn't be considered a requirement to doing business, nor to avoid being stolen from.

It is the business of people who are selling things to understand what makes people buy the things they are selling. Trying to fence out people's alternatives, rather than making what you sell desireable to the consumer, does not seem to me to be a viable business strategy in the long run.

The entire game plan of most large organizations dealing with copyrightable products seems to be be centered on preserving the way things used to be done, rather than adapting to the inevitable changes to the old ways that result from the corrossive and disruptive effects of the digital world.