From the "Salvos Against Big Brother 6" - There Ain't No Such Thing as a Free Lunch - in the 6th issue of Jim Baen's Universe (April 2007 e-arc)
http://www.baens-universe.com/
Excerpt:
"Now apply that toll road principle to the problem of electronic copy infringement. Is it absolute nonsense to claim that "pirating" an electronic text means that you got it for "free." Uh, no, you didn't. You may have saved some money—but you did it at the expense of spending time and labor to circumvent the legal process. Your time and labor—not the victim's.
In the real world, criminals do not do everything in a criminal manner. Whatever you or I think of their morals, they are just as capable as anyone else of gauging an enterprise from the standpoint of its cost-effectiveness.
Bank robbers do indeed rob banks. But here's what they don't do, or do very, very rarely:
They don't illegally siphon gas from a neighbor's car to fuel the getaway vehicle. Instead, they buy the gasoline.
They might steal the gun they're planning to use to rob the banks, because guns are expensive. But they're not likely to steal the ammunition—much less try to make the ammunition themselves. Why bother? They're not planning to fight a war, they simply need enough ammunition to load a gun. So they buy the ammunition.
I would think the point is obvious. Pirates rob bullion ships, they don't rob grain ships. Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an "economic epidemic" under certain conditions. Any one of the following:
1) The product they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.
2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.
3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.
Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.
And . . .
Guess what? It's precisely those three conditions that DRM creates in the first place. So far from being an impediment to so-called "online piracy," it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.
Let's start with the third point. A DRM-crippled text is a royal pain in the ass for legitimate customers. First of all, because you have to have the right software (and often hardware) to use Product A as opposed to Product B—since the publishing and software industries can't agree on a common standard. And, secondly, because you have absolutely no guarantee that next year those same industries won't make the software you purchased from them obsolete and thereby make the books you bought unreadable.
Can we say "eight-track tape?" "Beta-Max?" "Vinyl LPs?"
The buying public, by now, has long and bitter memories of the way the entertainment industries have shafted them over and over again, by introducing one technology, forcing everyone to adopt it—and then scrapping that technology in favor of yet another.
It's no wonder the reading public had so stubbornly resisted electronic reading. As I said above, they are not morons. Contrast the ridiculous demands that the publishing industry tries to place on their electronic text customers to the joys and splendors of buying a paper book:
You do not need an "end user license." Nope. Just buy the book with legal currency and you own it outright.
You do not need to buy separate software or hardware to read it. Nope. The only "software" you need is a pair of functioning eyes and a knowledge of the language the book is written in. Thazzit.
You now own a product that you can do any damn thing you want with. You can lend it to a friend, donate it to a library, use it for a doorstop or to swat a fly.
And, finally, you are in possession of a product whose technological durability and reliability has been tested and proven billions of times, and for centuries. Even a cheap paperback, with any degree of reasonable care, will still be readable half a century after you bought it—whereas not one piece of software has yet demonstrated that it can last much more than a few years.
Now let's move to the second point. Precisely because DRM has made electronic reading such a distasteful idea for most of the reading public—even a loathsome one, for many—it has strangled the market in its crib. Despite all the rosy projections and predictions, year after year after year, the electronic reading industry has remained miniscule compared to the paper book industry. Is it any wonder?
But certain things go along with that. If you can only sell a few units of a product, you will have to charge more per unit to cover your operating costs and hope to make a profit. So . . .
We now have the grotesque phenomenon where publishers typically charge more for an electronic book than they do for a paper book—even though everyone knows perfectly well that electronic texts are far cheaper to produce and distribute. That's mostly because the distribution costs that typically swallow about half of all income generated by paper books sales—and a higher percentage for paper magazines—is relatively tiny for an electronic publication.
And, so, dragged by the inexorable logic of this DRM lunacy, we arrive back at point one. Because electronic books are disliked by most of the public, and are then further constricted in terms of the market by being over-priced, they also become relatively rare. And it's probably rarity more than anything that fuels most book-stealing, whether of paper or electronic editions."