@Paul – thanks for the comment.

I suggested a similar value measuring exercise a while ago on the MCG list:

“What would be fantastic (if unlikely) would be if a museum or gallery agreed to take part in a quantitative study: take one selection of images and hide them away behind watermarking, DRM and thumbnails; take another and make these widely and hugely available via Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, blogging, etc. Offer both sets for purchase in hi-res, then sit back and measure over a period of time. Common sense says that people will steal all the small ones and not bother buying: increasing bodies of evidence show the opposite is actually true.”

I’d love to see such a study…