Mizter T wrote in
[...]
Going back to the database mining idea, I suppose one could just
kinda
ignore the licence - after all lots of technological progress has
happened in spite of various bits of intellectual property law...

(The latter point is of course devilishly complex on many levels and
cuts several ways - for example, I'm not entirely sure a career as a
novelist will be quite so rewarding in say ten or twenty years time
when e-book readers have really taken off, and hackers really get to
work on the associated e-book DRM systems. Not of course that a great
many novelists' careers are that rewarding at present!)

For ten years, ie since December 1999, every novel published by Baen
(number 3 US publisher of SF) has been on sale as an e-book with no DRM
and no geographical restrictions.

http://www.webscription.net

Some (typically the first of a series) are even free.

Baen authors are mostly happy with their ebook royalties since no DRM
seems to result in higher sales and certainly reduces reader problems.
One author reports steady sales and royalties for a paperback that has
been a free ebook for eight years (_1632_ by Eric Flint, recommended
AH).


On the hacker front, most DRM schemes have already been broken and
indeed books never issued as ebooks have been illegally scanned, OCR'd
and made available over torrent.

--
Mike D