You can pirate all my books, and the top-selling ones are easiest to find. I have a notification set when Google finds new pirate sources, and those notifications roughly track the sales of the books.

The download sites are all in developing countries where the books are not available except by import that would cost 10X or more US buying power relative to price.

In other words, I lost very little income to piracy despite publishers no longer bothering to try to take down piracy sites. In fact it's an open question if piracy helped sell more books because of engagement from readers in developing countries I would not have reached but for piracy.

The explicitly stated purpose of the copyright clause is not to protect "your lucrative concepts." It is “To promote the progress of science and useful arts," a collective benefit. So if optimal promotion of "science and the useful arts," not commerce, notably, means setting the terms to short, very short, or zero, that's perfectly legal.

All of my public work is open source under the MIT license.

Just because you aren't protected by the government, doesn't mean you can't protect your inventions through secrecy.

This is one of the points I'm more pragmatic about. Secrecy breeds loss. The products of human creative toil should be kept and enjoyed by all, versus being locked-up being veils of secrecy that inevitably lead to their loss. The only way to preserve ideas is for them to proliferate.

> The products of human creative toil should be kept and enjoyed by all, versus being locked-up being veils of secrecy that inevitably lead to their loss.

Tell that to Disney:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Disney_Vault&oldi...

UPDATE: Another example: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20810558

Secrecy only works for some types of work.