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Leaving the moral discussion aside, I'm a little bit surprised to read some people think DRM will evolve up to a point they would be impossible to remove and/or easy to trace if removed. It goes completely against my own ideas of what is possible and what isn't in the software world.
HarryT, you quoted "amazon author", but do you even believe it?
To begin with, at some point the book must be readable on the screen. So one could simply take screenshots and OCR. And that can easily be made "untraceable". So, unless the future prepares software that is able to prevent any screenshot to be taken (including from unplugged photographic devices), I don't see how the pirates' situation could be made worse than now.
Plus, copyright owners technically have to let consumer break their DRM schemes: through the Copyright owners' approved software. At its heart, DRM stuff is wanting to let a client access content on his own computer while hoping the client doesn't control it (the computer). There are a lot of barriers for the "perfect DRM control", and one of them is that currently people can easily have unsupervised offline computers and can do whatever they want with the bits stored inside (changing them into 1 or 0). Anything that a software does with an online computer can be replicated later offline, and at some point the content of an ebook is raw in the client's computer memory.
On a side note, tracing bits (spyware) only work when people are unaware it exists. Once people know it is there, it is removed (if they have the will to do so). DRM spyware, DRM watermark, whatever it is, it shall be removed (at worse with the screenshot/OCR method which is a fallback that isn't even needed today).
What I mean by that is it will work only "once" (for a short while). Once people know there is spyware stuff, either they will be able to remove the spyware, either they won't be and it shall act a deterrent (from pirating, but also from buying in the first place).
Lastly, let me remind you that people's computers can be hacked, or even stolen, and their content distributed to the internet. If police finds a watermarked ebook illegally shared on the internet that was shared without the original buyer knowledge and/or consent, what do?
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