So, it is the magic sprinkles of copyright that prevents people from putting up LBO for free on the net? Then how come this magic sprinkle didn’t work with Napster, KaZaa etc? Speaking of LBO/Doug in specific, my guess is that the reason why he is able to get paid for it (at least to the point where piracy has not made it worthless) is that he has relatively honest subscribers.
Speaking generally, this won’t work of course. If Doug turned Friedman and wrote illiterate paeans to globalism, then he would be on bestseller lists, and his PDFs would be flying off the torrents as if they were the written equivalents of Justin Bieber’s warbling. At which point Doug stops distributing PDFs and takes refuge in paper and protected stuff like Kindle/ePub.
—ravi