you because other people can access their stuff first, therefore you have not been given the moral authority to get your Robin Hood on. That said, I think technology is well and truly stacked against creators and I'm not sure that there's anything short of massive social opprobrium and aggressive legal action that can put a dent in the piracy problem. DRM is too easily cracked. The value of digital media is plummeting because there is no scarcity. Creators such as musicians are trying to make a buck on touring rather than media not because they prefer it that way, but because the current marketplace is robbing them of an alternative. I don't see a technological fix for (4). Where it falls down for piracy advocates is that "because I can" is also not a moral justification for it. Thanks very much for posting this, because I was one of those who asked for your opinion on the matter. It's clearly well thought out and something that affects you personally. I've been giving it a lot of thought myself for the past decade and a half, since I'm employed by the publishing industry, and I'm a published author myself -- I wrote a few programming books for O'Reilly; hardly bestseller territory, and my royalty checks allow me, at most, a nice dinner out when I get them, but it does give me a horse in this race, so to speak. Technical books, like sci-fi books, are quite frequently pirated, since