Several years ago I had an opportunity to become an author of some technical books. My publisher includes me in his occasional email missives to current and former authors and editors. Recently he sent out a message that describes his struggles with issues surrounding the piracy of the electronic versions of our books. Part of his observations questioned the wisdom of recent lawsuits against Google for their Google Print project. His position is that print-only publishers will sooner or later go the way of the Great Auk and the Dodo Bird. It's better to deal with the issues surrounding digital publishing than to stick one's head in the sand and hope that it will go away.
I'm not sure that print publishing will actually be dead in my lifetime, But as a consumer I hate all the DRM (Digital Rights Management) solutions out there. I thwart DRM on music at every opportunity. I rip CD's to DRM-free high-bitrate MP3's then convert it to low-bitrate WMA format to load on my portable player. It's a pain to do the two-step process, but the resulting files can be archived onto CD's and I can play 'em anytime, anywhere, on any device.
I've been working on a team that has been developing computer-based content for education of technology entrepreneurs. We wanted everyone on the team to evaluate a textbook from Stanford University and we all ponied up the $42 to purchase the e-book from Zinio. I had trouble getting it to recognize my license to read the damn book on the machine from which I purchased, downloaded and installed the book, let alone the next machine that I buy and to which I will attempt to transfer the book! And if the mechanism were to make it easy for the transfer, how easy will it be to pirate the copyrighted material?
I'm glad it's not my problem to solve, but filing lawsuits doesn't solve the problem, and refusing to allow distribution of information in an electronic format or searching of content using online search tools doesn't solve the problem either; it only marginalizes the content. If I'm an author hoping to get a lot of copies of my book out there, then marginalizing my work isn't what I'm about.
My deeper concern about DRM, patent and copyright issues is that the criminal prosecutions and litigation are evidence of a failure of innovation. The world is changing, which is always a threat, but also (always, always) an opportunity. Maybe the old business models don't work. Look at what some companies are doing with open source (free as in beer) software. Rather than fight it, they're recognizing the technical viability of these products, and finding ways of adding value that creates a viable business model. The marketing of creative works and other Intellectual property too might need to be re-thought.
I don't have a solution to the fair-use and "piracy" problems, but I do know that standing in front of the digital bulldozer by filing lawsuits isn'g going to solve it either.