Steve &
Bob have the right idea. Pirates exist to make money. There are two basic ways to fight them.
- Make it difficult for them to work
- Make it unprofitable for them to work
DRM is a way to make it difficult but like
rlauzon keeps saying, if you build a lock, someone else can find a way to unlock it. We all realize here that that will not work in the long run.
A better way is to make it unprofitable.
- Laws are an attempt at that but in a world economy, sans a world government, that won't work.
- DRM lowers the profit for the pitate, i.e. they have to do more work to pirate something DRMed so their profit is less. But as already seen, that doesn't work.
- The only way it will work (and maybe this is wishful thinking) is to make ebooks cheap enough that the pirates profit is so low they will not go to the effort.
To a certain extent, this last alternative has already happened in the music industry with music brokers (e.g. Wal Mart) selling individual songs. With that mechanism you can buy, for e$0.88, just the songs you want instead of the CD bundle which, in my experience, has at least one song I hate & several that I don't particularly like. I buy the CD because of one or two songs I really like.
IMHO, reducing the pirates profit is the only workable solution.