Peace, Xenophon, I'm pretty sure that Alexander, of all people, never meant to imply that anyone was a pirate either in the misleading copyright infringement sense or in the real, "walk the plank" sense! I expect it's just a matter of the phrasing not reading to someone else the way he meant it to read when he wrote it.
It hadn't occurred to me that it could be taken that way either, but now that you've pointed it out, I can see where it could be read that way. In any case, I'm really confident that it wasn't meant that way.
Baen and the other legal sources you mentioned not withstanding (you left out fictionbook's MultiFormat, BTW
), the majority of new titles are going to be DRMed if they're available at all. I think what Alexander was trying to get at was whether our individual views of DRM allow us to buy a
reading device that even
supports DRM at all (along with non-DRM files), or if we will only buy a reading device that doesn't support DRM at all.
To put it in terms of specific devices (I think Alexander was trying to keep it more general):
- I'm willing to buy something like the Sony Reader, which supports DRM (along with non-DRM file support).
- I'm strongly anti-DRM enough to insist on something like the forthcoming NAEB Reader, which doesn't offer any DRM support at all.