[cian]

You know, I'm yet to meet, read about, hear about or in any other way come to know about any author who writes a book soley for a financial incentive. I know about many who hope and dream and attempt to gain financially from their writing but none who write solely for financial gain. Do you see the difference?

And yet, even it there is one,(and if you know of one could you please point them out for the sake of the argument) that is their prerogative. If it goes so against your beliefs for them to do that then by all means don't buy their book.

I'm not sure this is the killer argument that you think it is. Author's wishes for their works are overriden all the time. Sometimes legally, sometimes illegally (but universally). So for example, in the UK timeshifting is illegal, but everyone does it. Making archive copies of movies shown on TV and keeping them is definitely illegal, but its also universal.

For years we've been told that copying music (tapes, CD-Rs and now MP3s) and given them to friends/family is illegal. Its also pretty universal. The moral argument, if there is one, has made no traction, indeed is seen as risible (anybody British remember the derision with which "Home Taping is Killing Music" was treated?). Region coding on DVDs is seen as an irritant, that moderately sophisticated people buy players to get round, despite this also being quasi-legal. Anecdotally, backing up DVDs is seen as perfectly acceptable, despite this also being technically illegal and requiring special software. Photocopying is a very limited right, that is routinely flouted.

So illegal flouting of the authors intentions is fairly routine, and socially seen as okay.

Legal flouting also happens. I'm sure some authors, if given the choice, would prevent their books from being available in public libraries. Not an option. Many authors would love to ban the sale of second hand books, as would publishers (and with DRM may, at least in their minds, get their wish). They receive nothing from these sales. They used to be an irritant, but has now become competition thanks to first the internet, and now Amazon selling second hand copies on the same page as the new copies. A couple of years ago some publishers tried to pressure Amazon to stop this practice, with little success. If publishers could control what you could do with books, second hand books would disappear, and this is probably one of the intents of DRM.

Society has granted authors certain rights, but society could equally renounce those. There's no natural right there, and they only exist to the extent that they're enforcable. So far the evidence suggests they're not enforcable in the private space, and people largely see them as only applicable to the commercial space. On the other hand I think most people see commercial piracy as wrong, even those who might buy the odd cheap DVD from a market stall feel they probably shouldn't. That's crossing a boundary that doesn't seem to exist for other forms of copying/sharing. Socially, there seems to be a consensus that commercial copying (For profit) is wrong, and amateur/social copying is okay. And laws, and technologies, that go against that are probably doomed to fail one way (being flouted/bypassed), or another (the technology is ignored/not bought).

What's changed in recent years is that networks have made it much easier to share, and technology has made copying painless and free. And so these informal ideas about sharing have extended into a wider space. So now you can share MP3s on blogs, put videos on youtube, articles on your website. You could do all these things before, but it was harder and with a much smaller network of people known to you personally. This is all illegal, but most people (because they don't profit from it, and do it simply for the love of the thing) don't see it that way. And that is unlikely to change. People like to share the things they love with the world, which is actually a good instinct. Telling people that they're stealing when they do this isn't going to work, because they don't feel like thieves.

New technologies change social practices, together with what's seen as acceptable. And publishers are going to have to deal with that. People talk as if its a total loss for publishers/authors, but I don't think that's true. And I think publishers have, along with music industry, damaged their moral case by overreaching with the technology. DRM damages them because it reduces what you can do with media, at a time when technology increases the possibilities. Telling people there's an (effective) time limit on how long you can listen to your music (X media players) is insane, when people have record collections going back years. Preventing them from sharing with friends, when this is what they've done for years, is simply not going to work. Yes they will lose to piracy, but they've lost revenues to second hand book stores, remainder stores, private lending and libraries for years. Somehow they survived. There may be more sharing with digital culture, but there will also be reduced overheads, less commercial competition (no more second hand book stores) and much easier promotion. There will be new forms of revenue (renting, subscriptions), and people with money will be quite happy to pay reasonable amounts for convenient access and high quality. And the quicker publishers act to give people what they want, the less time amateur piracy will have to become socially acceptable.