Japanese teenagers are very enthusiastic about embracing new technology, even if its just to be trendy. They are an interesting study in human nature and their trends often pave a pathway that other societies eventually follow.
They had multi-function phones that were connected to the internet continuously since their major cities were early adopters of broad free WiFi coverage, long before other cultures.
Nobody wanted to buy a whole CD, when they only wanted a certain hit song. Japanese teens could download a new hit song for 99-cents onto their phone, which also acted as a music player.
There were experiments with pricing, and it was found that if you tried to sell a single song for $2, it was worth a teenagers time to de-crypt the copy-protection and send it free to all their friends. This was long before the "Apple Store" sold songs one at a time, which I believe was forced by the "Napster" evolution of enabling college students to copy songs in a very easy way. But for 99-cents? one hit song makes a million dollars without printing a single CD.
There is a program called "grabit" which allows anyone to copy whatever is on your screen. If you hand me a copy-protected disc or an encrypted PDF, I can bring up each page and "grab it", then put it into a non-encrypted non-copy-protected document that I can send to all my friends for free.
This is why publishers are only allowing their books onto a stand-alone format called the kindle. You buy hundreds of books online, and carry them on your kindle to read on the trains, planes, and automobiles. Inability to copy material and high prices of new hit books results in the Kindle being a vary poor seller.
I can buy a new book, and after I read it I can give it to a friend. One hundred people can read it after it is purchased only once. But if I purchase a half-price electronic version, I don't actually "own" it.
I might borrow a book from the library, but if its very useful as a reference, I will want my own copy. If the price is expensive, or they are simply no longer in print for sale, its worth it to some people to make a copy.
I have copied 5 books from the library at a Kinko's because they were not for sale anywhere. I had looked for 10 years for any book from a certain author, and finally found 1 of 6 at a used book store. I gave up, and copied the other 5.
When I was a kid, I made cassette tapes of only my favorite songs by holding a recorder up to the radio speaker. Quality was poor, but I was too young to have a paper route job yet (no money). Remember the Seinfeld episode where he went into new movies and used a video recorder from the back row?
If the info is valuable, and the price is very cheap, its not worth trying to copy it, or to live without it.