[ApK]

The "piracy encourages sales" argument sounds a lot like the school bully who steals a kid's lunch money and says "I did you a favor, bro. Lunch is awful today."

In short: If the copyright owner wanted your help he'd tell you so. You are stealing his control and his right to make those decisions for his own work, in violation of copyright law.

When speaking of copyright issues, which is what DRM is primarily about, there is no comparison or similarity between giving someone a physical book, which fine, legal and proper, and creating an unauthorized duplicate of an ebook and distributing it to someone in express violation of the permissions you were given, which is precisely what copyright law exists to prevent you from doing, and no Machiavellian rationalization about how much people like the pirated copies and what they might do afterwards justifies it.

That being said, there IS important value in sharing books, and nothing I said above changes my conviction that copyright law, DRM systems, licenses and fair use doctrine, SHOULD include fair and unobtrusive mechanisms and policies for sharing and lending.

ApK