A great essay on why piracy is not harming legitimate sales of books but DRM is...

Quoted: Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an "economic epidemic" under certain conditions. Any one of the following:

Quoted: 1) The products they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.

Quoted: 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.

Quoted: 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

Quoted: Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.

Tim O'Reilly blogging about when free distribution is the best approach. I love the example from Frank Herbert's "Dune," using the ecological example of "law of the minimum" - that growth is "limited by the necessary nutrient that is in shortest supply."

Quoted: A lot has to do with the ratio of possible consumers of the free product who might be converted to paying customers to the total market size. If I have awareness with .01% of the target market, giving copies away to raise awareness to 10% of the market, where 10% of those might convert (1% total) is a good deal. But if I have awareness with 60% of the target market, and give my product away, with a 10% conversion rate, I've lost a great deal.