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Being social and sharing has always been an issue when selling books. Yes, people can now share their copy and read it at the same time, but exactly how much impact this has over the old serial form of sharing is really hard to tell. Most avid readers tend to have a fairly large TBR list, waiting for a copy was generally not much of a problem.
Generally I think that people sharing within their small group is usual and to be expected - and I mean this both ways. The writer should expect it to happen and the readers expect to be able to do it, but this is where DRM steps in and - in some instances - makes things awkward and annoys the reader. You may well say that that's as it should be, but remember that if you sell your ebook for a buck or two of profit you are still doing just as well when the same happened to authors selling paper books.
Large scale piracy - sharing (or selling on) to anyone/everyone around the 'net - is a different kettle of very smelly fish all together. Here it may be possible to argue that new/unknown authors could actually benefit from such distribution channels (at least they're being read/discovered). I find it less easy to argue that well known authors would receive the same benefit, I suspect there are only downsides for them. BUT I don't think that existing DRM methods make much of an impact on this form of piracy.
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