As the former CEO of a large software company (back in the 80s and early 90s) copy protection was always a major issue for us. Originally we put copy protection on all our software and ended up in the usual battle to stay ahead of the hackers. Eventually, we decided to drop copy protection entirely (with one exception...). The result - sales went up noticeably! The one exception was the Italian version of our software. It turned out that the Italian government itself was buying one copy of our software and then making and distributing illegal copies to all of their agencies!
Back to eBooks...
I have had a
Kindle DX for more than a year. My wife just bought a
Kindle 3 and I just did as well (mine should be here tomorrow). As soon as I get my Kindle 3, I plan on trying to break DRM on subscriptions.
Amazon and most book publishers allow you to download books on up to 5 Kindle readers/devices registered to one account, which is very reasonable. On the other hand, at this point all newspaper subscriptions on the Kindle do not allow this at all. So if my wife and I both want to read the New York Times, they except us to buy two subscriptions? Since we both read the paper version now, why not require us to get two paper subscriptions as well? This restriction is absurd and I have no qualms about breaking the DRM on newspaper and magazine subscriptions to duplicate the real world usage for paper editions.