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Originally Posted by HarryT
You have only to read this site to see that a significant proportion of posters appear to be quite happy to download eBooks that they haven't paid for. Some like to pretend that it's perfectly OK to download an eBook if they've previously bought the paper version (logic which somewhat baffles me); others openly admit that they never buy eBooks because they can download them freely and "it's no different from borrowing books from the library".
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The question is whether the folks like that here constitute a representative sampling of the market.
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And these, by and large, are the same people who claim to have some "moral objection" to DRM - a mechanism which would prevent the criminal activity that they are engaged in. What they really mean of course is that if DRM were universally adopted, their supply of free books would dry up and that would be terrible  .
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I object to DRM, but it's practical, not moral. I thing DRM is counter-productive and ultimately futile.
It's like computer security: the perfectly secure computer is the perfectly unusable one. The more security measures you put in place, the harder it is for the user to actually do any work with it. (And users can be endlessly creative about bypassing security...)
DRM is the same. Make it hard enough for people to get and read their books, and they find ways around it. And most DRM systems are relatively easy to crack.
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Perhaps I'm just getting cynical in my old age...
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I'm cynical, too, but ultimately, I believe there are enough honest folks out there to make a healthy system, without imposing draconian measures on everyone because of the actions of a few.
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Dennis