[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by Happ

Actually, copyright laws are geared toward the following situation: if the market makes it possible to make money out of somebody’s work, then no one can make that money without the author’s explicit consent.

I wouldn't go that far either. I'm sure there are ways of making money from secondary markets around a work, without requiring the copyright holder's permission, and there probably should be.

So, back to basics. Who believes in this forum we can sell non-DRM e-books and not be swallowed by free file-sharing?

I do. Other similar markets have successfully done it. Don't worry about the filesharers. There's nothing you can do to stop them. Make a quality product at a price that people see as providing value for the cost, and you can be successful. You're never going to eliminate filesharing, but it won't kill your business either as long as you do the above. Filesharing becomes a serious threat when you're not doing the above, or when your business model depends on an artificial monopoly so that you don't have to do the above.

Now think carefully about strategies to convince publishers and authors of that.

Convincing artists that they can make money with non-DRMd digital works is one thing. Convincing the publishing industry (or RIAA, MPAA, etc), whose main business comes from the fact that they are the bottleneck between the customer and the product, is going to be a lot harder. "The industry" is not really interested in DRM as a means to protect the artists. They're interested in it from the perspective of locking down control over the distribution channels, as well as eliminating traditional rights that they feel hurts their business (fair use, first sale, etc). The industry doesn't care about filesharing because it hurts the artists livelihood, they care about it because it's a competitor to their business model.

The artificial monopoly that copyright grants gives them the power to abuse their position that a (theoretical) free market would not allow. They will fight very hard to keep that power, and even try to expand it (which is why DRM is only partially about copyright enforcement).

What the large/established members of that industry fear is that consumers and artists will realize that they don't need them to be distributors anymore. When that happens (it's already starting), they lose their power. Without that power, they lose their traditional business model.