Copy Protection

David Pogue has an interesting article about copy protection on the Kindle and other eBook readers. He relates the current state of digital books to what the music industry went through a couple of years ago.  When music first went main-stream digital, it was locked down with DRM.  Then, as consumers complained, DRM went away.  Well, now we’re on the same ride with eBooks; the Kindle has these books locked down with DRM.  Not only does that restrict how you work with the file, Amazon can even remove your book from your library.  In all, same story, smaller market.  And this got me thinking about copy protection in general.
I work for a copy that makes digital stuff. All we do is code and edit little text files, compile them into an “application” and sell it on the web. So, there are 200 people that work and live by bytes of data being sold.  Nothing we make or do exists in the “real world”.  Do we have piracy issues? You bet! Doesn’t take a genius to find a copy of our product available on the web. Yet, we make money. In fact, you could argue we make more money than most successful musicians (it just takes a little more overhead for each release).
So, if piracy is real and our company still flourishes and grows and David Progue still sells books and Taylor Swift still sells CDs and MP3 downloads… what harm is piracy doing?
I think it would be interesting to do a psychological analysis on people that buy a digital product versus pirating it. And then, I’d like to see what happens to people as they use this digital copy over the next week, month, year. I have a hunch that there is a very real difference in how people interact with digital goods that have been purchased versus those that have been “acquired”. And, I think it all has to do with how people value objects.  This is a very meta-physical/philosophical/Kantian way of looking at piracy, but I am curious what people think of things that have been pirated.  Do they still have value?  They must have enough value you that people “want them”.  But, after you get something for free, does is still have the value assigned to it before you pirated it (e.g. $0.99 for music, $1000.00 for some software, etc.)?