Quote:
Originally Posted by BoldlyDubious
Presently, if you buy media from mainstream services (Kindle, iTunes) you can do two things:
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2) strip the DRM and be free to share/backup your files, ...
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It'd be nice if we could separate these out for the purposes of this discussion. Personally I only strip DRM for backup and to use on all my devices. I do not do it to "share" them.
The more I think about this proposal the more it seems like a lot of change for not very much gain. I get that you care a lot about having the freedom to share legally with friends and family. However limited sharing is already available legally (use on N devices, lend the physcial device). For me the downsides to your scheme are not worth the extra little bit of freedom.
But I think a lot of these arguments become irrelevant unless and until you can convince publishers to adopt your scheme. I suspect that if you could get them interested by the time it came to agreement the fines/penalties would be much harsher and the "legalised casual sharing" would be more limited than you propose. In fact I suspect it wouldn't be much different to what we have now but with water-marked files.