Copy Protection on Information Products

I've always felt that my information products, like e-Books and Internet-delivered reports, should be free of copy protection and digital rights management.

But listening to an attorney on a podcast recently (scroll down to "Inside the Net 023 - Michael Geist)"), I realized that my instinctive reaction makes a lot of sense.

My battle with getting paid for my e-Books is not against people who are illegally obtaining it. 99.9% of the people who didn't buy my book haven't heard of my e-Book! Therefore, if a few people steal the e-Book, and then the word gets out more and more about my e-Book, that will help more people know about it, helping me with my REAL battle - obscurity.

This leads me to state that putting copy protection on an independently produced piece of content (whether e-Book, music, poetry, stories, podcast, etc.) is an obscurity assurance program. Maybe copy protection makes sense for big companies, but for us independent producers, forget it. It is bad business.