[tirsales]

Originally Posted by Shaggy

Will they? The RIAA lawsuits and P2P sharing is already starting to show that model is broken. If you're talking physical albums, then yes. But if you're talking mp3's, do you really think the RIAA will be getting a lot of money from online mp3 sales in the future? Musicians will make far more money from concerts than they ever will from mp3 royalties.

Yes. But they WILL continue to earn money from MP3 royalties - no matter the drm, it is still forbidden to copy mp3 and it will continue to be so.
It is easy to copy MP3 - but they still get selled.

As a programmer do you expect to be able to write one piece of software, and then make a living for the rest of your life without writing anything else?

No. But do you know how few authors can do this? I guess you can count them with one hand, without using binary counting ... Harry Potter is a big exception, but most successfull authors write MANY years before selling their first book and writing MANY books before getting a top-seller.

An obscure "second market" for software is charging for support. There's already a huge number of companies out there that have adopted the business model of giving the software away for free, but charging for a support service. Open Source software is the one that people think of the most, but even companies like Oracle, Sun, IBM, etc (which historically made a lot of money off of sales) are giving away their software for free these days and making all of their money from support contracts.

Yes. But the majority still earns via selling software. The company, at which I work (boy, english is definetly not my first language), sells support - giving away software for free. But we also sell software - and both parts earn money.
Yes, there are many possible business models - e.g. flatrates, monthly paying, additional services, etc and authors will need to adopt. But they will continue to earn money selling (e-)books and this is as it should be.
Perhaps a flatrate? Calculate it - the complete industrie will earn more and it is possible to calculate market shares to calculate the profit of each author / musician / etc.
Authors selling their eBooks and special "additional packages"? Or direct selling of unprotected books (yes, it gets paid), etc There are many possible models.

There is no such thing as DRM that can't be broken, there is no solution that will work. As a programmer, you should know this. Going down that path is a losing battle that just acts to delay the inevitable.

I never talked about unbreakable drm. Can you break a serial number? Yes, without any problems, just by googling.
Can you copy copyprotected DVDs? Without any problem. Can I do this? Without any second problem. Do I still buy (and rend) DVDs? Yes. And most people I know do this as well - and not only since "breaking a copyright" is illegal in germany.
Hell - you can break ANY system...

So? Where is the problem? Most people still buy their software (not all, but a large chunk).
What about e.g. letting you download a book, then entering a serial for that given device, a short connection to the server validating your serial (and registering that book-serial to that device, so that you can share with a number of people and devices, but not with everyone) and then giving you access to that book?
Can it be broken? Yes. Even when using hard cryptografic approaches (each device with a given security-chip and a book-encryption specific to that chip, etc). Will most people break it? No. Not if the deal is fair - e.g. reading the book on multiple readers in your family, etc

It's not about unbreakable DRM - we can agree on this one. That the industrie is continuing to try to enforce something as laughable as this (see BluRay, Windows Vista, WMA, DRM'd eBooks, etc) is ridiculous. But thats really not the point. (Oh and we can agree that DRM in its current usage is evil).
And yes, authors (and the whole publishing industrie) need to adopt to the new market - but not to the point, that they give up earning with their products.