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Originally Posted by Jaden
You sound like it was okay to punish billons of innocent people as long as some been guilty.
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This confuses me. Who are these billions? As far as I know, only a tiny, tiny portion of people who are arrested are brought into custody for piracy.
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DRM is not only imperfect, it's completely useless - unless it was created to annoy paying customers.
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Since the 1840's, most books have been read not by purchasers, but by borrowers.* Therefore, the DRM issue should be looked at primarily for how it affects the majority of readers, not the minority with enough money to pay for books.
Until last September, I only used my Kindle for newspapers, essays, and public domain. If it wasn't for DRM, that would still be the case, but DRM has allowed library eBook borrowing, which I now use a lot. In your no-DRM world, I don't see how the Overdrive/library model could work.
The publishers are constantly experimenting in terms of price points. If any publishers are failing to pay attention to the data coming from that experimentation, they will go out of business.
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* EDITED: Thinking back on this post, I could have been a little high-handed regarding evidence here. My ideas about how nineteenth century people got their books come mostly from novels mentioning the famous Mudie's Lending Library, but I don't really know for a fact that more books were borrowed than bought in any given decade.
Here are what appear to me quite accurate statistics for Canada today.