Also visit totally off the record. The soon with the new revesions it offers another view into "passalong" economics.
Tim O'Reilly clears the air wonderfully on piracy (and quotes me)..
Tim O'Reilly clears the air on piracy (and quotes me).
1) Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors and creative artists than piracy,
(2) Piracy is progressive taxation;
(3) Customers want to do the right thing, if they can;
A similar data point comes from Jon Schull, the former CTO of Softlock, the company that worked with Stephen King on his eBook experiment, "Riding the Bullet". Softlock, which used a strong DRM scheme, was relying on "superdistribution" to reduce the costs of hosting the content--the idea that customers would redistribute their copies to friends, who would then simply need to download a key to unlock said copy. But most of the copies were downloaded anyway and very few were passed along. Softlock ran a customer survey to find out why there was so little "pass-along" activity. The answer, surprisingly, was that customers didn't understand that redistribution was desired. They didn't do it because they "thought it was wrong."
(4)Shoplifting is a bigger threat than piracy;
(5) File sharing networks don't threaten book, music, or film publishing. They threaten existing publishers;
(6)"Free" is eventually replaced by a higher-quality paid service;
(7)There's more than one way to do it. "
Tim summarises the study well and truly, but I have to say...it ought to be done again (and again). The world changes and the insights that can come from a systematic study of "passalong" are economically important and scientifically deep. Please contact me if you have vision and a venue. [Jon Schull's Weblog]
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Information foraging theory seeks to explain information-seeking behavior in humans. Central to its thesis is that information foraging is an exaptation of food foraging mechanisms, therefore models of optimal foraging theory developed by anthropologists and ecologists in the study of food foraging will help us understand foraging behavior in consumers of information. These models allow us to investigate foraging behavior in relation to particular environmental conditions and the constraints of foraging for information in a dynamic ecology... (via 
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