Flint expresses well my own point of view, and ties together a number of things I also believe are true.

One geeky way of putting it: If "piracy" really was harmful, one would expect it to be inversely proportional to sales. Instead, what one finds is exactly the opposite: "Piracy" is always directly proportional to sales.

But his points about the opacity of the book market are particularly well made.

By the way... Flint's next essay in this series is available, and also makes a number of good points. This time the topic is Fair Use.

Nice job, Mr. Flint. Though he did miss one trick. Because paper books are still generally viewed as much easier to read than electronic ones, authors still loose far more sales to the "piracy" of people lending their paper books to their friends than they do through copying of electronic files. I'm sure the DRM freaks are busily working on biometric measures that they can use to staunch this dreadful drain on their revenue. - Cheryl

It's the same argument that Tim O'Reilly was making when he said the enemy of most authors isn't piracy, it's obscurity. Both O'Reilly and Flint are absolutely correct.

Interesting stuff.

I had a long discussion with a woman in her fifties who is an established but unpublished poet in the area - one of these people who are extremely well-known and respected within the immediate poetry community, but because they don't submit, nobody outside their area has heard of them. She doesn't submit because she feels incompetent to tell legitimate poetry publishers apart from scam artists, and is under the impression that scam artists abound. I had mentioned publishing online and she was horrified that I would allow such unfettered access to my work. She wanted to know why I wasn't worried about people stealing it. I said I thought the likelihood of that was very low, and vastly outweighed by the promotional aspect of having one's work available for free. She thinks I'm naive. It was a truly bizarre conversation.

I just MeFied this.

I'm with him. DRM for books just doesn't make sense.