Originally Posted by AmeliaG

The Los Angeles Public Library lends digital media and, at any given time, they can loan however many copies they bought. Does lending a book decrease sales? Very likely, but by such a negligible number that nobody much cares. If, for every person who buys a book, there are two or three more who don't need it any more, that is not that big a deal. The orders of magnitude for online sharing are very different when tens of thousands of people don't need to buy that book any more, yet the stats show they were interested. I know I find it frustrating when I find my work in a forum where it has obviously been downloaded tens of thousands of times and people are saying really nice things, like they rarely do on the SNS systems any more, and, as a creative person, I want to leave the files there, but, as a business person, I know it is DMCA time.