Brad Wardell explains why copy protection is pointless:
Instead of worrying about pirates, just leave the content out in the open. The market Reznor plays to will still buy the music; he’s simply stopped worrying about the pirates. He came to the same conclusion: they weren’t customers, they might never be customers, so spending money to try to stop them serves no purpose…. “When Sins popped up as the #1 best selling game at retail a couple weeks ago, a game that has no copy protect whatsoever, that should tell you that piracy is not the primary issue.”
TIA is in a similar position. Most of its potential audience has never heard of it, so worrying about a theoretical loss of bookbuyers based on a few thousand downloads is absurd. As it happens, more copies of the physical book have been sold than been downloaded for free… and the fact that the most easily found etexts are those of the bestselling books should suffice to prove that only a very small percentage of ebook pirates were ever potential customers.