[sdiy] OTA book on eBay

[Rainer Buchty]

>Now, lots of my work has found its way onto file sharing networks
>despite it being readily available to buy, but still it is pirated (as
>is almost everything nowadays)

See, and that's the difference. You are still actively harvesting the 
market.

Now consider that your stock of CDs is sold and you completely retreat
from the market, i.e. don't want to re-fabricate any new or just sell
the pure data in an appropriate electronic form (MP3, OGG, whatever),
even though there's a huge demand.

Of course copying your work would be still IP violation, but OTOH it 
doesn't harm you, because you retreated already from the market.

Even if you re-entered the market at some time in the distant future, it 
still won't harm you, because the die-hard fans would buy the original 
release anyway -- and all the others, as you said yourself, probably 
wouldn't have bought it anyway.

In the mean time, though, a couple of people might have been get hooked 
by illegitimate copies, thus a few more die-hard fans were created.

Rainer