You may be thinking too deep into this. Go back to Flint's basic 3 items:
Quote:
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.
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Okay, number 1 may or may not be a good assumption for e-books... they can be hard to find just because there's so much stuff out there, and they're not necessarily valuable.
I concentrate on defeating numbers 2 and 3. Low prices and no DRM make my books easy enough to buy that they're not worth the trouble of stealing. Throw in number 1: They are easy to find (if you know about me, and can set 1 bookmark). That suggests that my books will never be pirated! Cool!
Of course, Flint didn't mention one more point: That copying for a friend or relative is a popular e-pastime, is not done for profit or gain, and still constitutes "piracy." Sure, a friend can recommend an e-book to someone they know. But if they can send a copy, they just saved their friend a couple of bucks.
I know we'll never eliminate "piracy." The key is to render it as harmless as possible, to bring its damage down to a workable level, and keep it there. The print industry does this now, and are satisfied with the system, but they haven't figured out how to control e-books yet. Adjusting the rules dictated by points 1-3 will eventually do that.