Digital book theft stems from technology. So why can't technology fix it? Because human beings are too human. And technology is basically stupid.

The means to encrypt and lock digital media exists. Unfortunately it's always, always insecure and the people it affects -- and annoys the most -- are the decent ones, the readers who buy your books legally and wouldn't dream of ripping you off. Someone cracked DVDs, and they were supposed to be impregnable. Same went for iTunes copy protection and, recently, the coding used to stop Kindle ebooks being shared around.

The truth is there are just a bunch of sad muppets out there who see copy protection as a challenge and will while away their sad little lives until they've found a way round it. After doing that they'll just run it across every piece of commercial work they can -- it doesn't really matter what it is -- and upload the results to a torrent site run from some distant country beyond the reach of lawyers.

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Why do they do this? I suspect because a lot of them simply hate the creative process. By denigrating the work of artists, authors, actors and musicians they make themselves feel equal: <em>I can't write or play or act, but I can damned well make sure you don't get paid just because you can.</em>

You could spend a fortune and a lifetime fighting these idiots and still they'd come back for more. It's an obsession, and for some of them an evangelical mission. They really do believe that intellectual property -- the idea that artists own their own work and have a right to be paid a little by those who use it -- is an affront to the world of the web, where everything is supposed to be 'free'.

One of the commenters on an earlier article here asked, 'What the difference between a book and a painting? Artists don't get paid every time someone walks into a gallery and looks at their work.' Well the difference is this. A painting is unique, and sells to one buyer on its uniqueness. The artist makes his or her living out of its individuality. A book is a mass-produced commercial item made to be sold, hopefully, in its thousands. If you want to justify your theft of books by comparing them with paintings you really are desperate indeed.

The problem of digital book theft may stem from technology but pathetic arguments like this demonstrate to me very clearly that the real issue is cultural. It's the plain fact that millions of people are quietly coming to believe that anything that can be downloaded from the Internet is OK provided you keep quiet about it. That what happens between you and your computer is secret, private, nobody else's business. That's why dumb men who'd never have gone into a porn shop and bought paedophile magazines now find themselves in jail after going out on the web and downloading filth they'd never have touched if it weren't for the Internet.

And that's why people who wouldn't dream of stealing a bar of chocolate from a supermarket will happily download books, video and music with a commercial value of hundreds of dollars while telling themselves they're not doing anything wrong.

Any attempted remedy for book theft, then, has to be cultural too. Let me produce one more article on this subject which hopefully raises a few ways in which the tide can be, if not turned, at least kept back a little.