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While I think Digimarc is highly likely to have skewed things in their favor in any survey they might have made, however the idea that the pirates are an older group does seem to favor it's being realistic.
Piracy of ebooks began quite innocently, long before there were ereaders or places to buy ebooks or even, I think, before the term "ebook" was coined. My first awareness of it was on the HP forum in Compuserve in the days before the internet was available to the public. I had an HP 95lx, a pocket sized MS-DOS computer and that and their calculator forums were where I participated. Someone wrote a text reader for the 95LX that was specifically designed for reading books that had been scanned into plain text files.
The problem with this was that none of us had heard of Gutenberg.org so we had no place to get books for it. A lot of people started scanning the books they were reading, proofing them and exchanging them. Compuserve had a very strict and rigidly enforced no-piracy policy but in those days that term only applied to software. Up to that point there wasn't anything else to pirate. MP3 hadn't become a thing yet and monitors didn't have the resolution to display decent images and even if they had upload speeds (1200 baud in those days) were far too slow to make that possible. Compuserve provided the forum space to upload these books for download, not seeing any legal or ethical issues.
Anyway, perfectly honest people, mostly software developers who had a high regard for the rights of authors, were trading books. It was years before anybody thought to call this piracy. It was done in complete innocence. There was never even a question asked about whether it was okay. Trading books was something we'd been taught to do since we were kids. Of course the ramifications were different with ebooks but it took a while to realize that.
I should mention that the numbers involved here were very small. I doubt if any book got downloaded more than 15 or 20 times by the various members and the most books I ever saw in the forum's library was about 40 or 50, if memory serves. The 95LX didn't have enough room on it to store more books than you would read. I had a 5 meg PCMCIA card in mine that cost almost $600, more than the 95LX cost. I didn't buy that till the 10 meg cards came out, bringing down the price from $1500.
Years later a few companies started selling ebooks for the Palm Pilot. That's when legal considerations first began to be discussed.
I'm 76 now. This began in the early 1990s when I was about 50 and I was one of the older people in the group. Probably most of those guys are in their 50s or thereabouts today.
Let me carefully state that I buy the books I read. I buy them from Amazon and in fact I buy probably 3 or 4 times as many books as I read every year. I've been buying ebooks since ebooks have been available for sale. I'm just trying to explain the history and that ebook piracy did begin in complete innocence. That's not to say it stayed innocent. Just that that's how it began. And that might explain why some older people still do it.
Barry
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