[murraypaul]

Originally Posted by BoldlyDubious

I'll try to demonstrate that, though my proposal does not affect this kind of illegal distribution, it will have positive effects on all the other types of "piracy", thus reducing it AND increasing the quality of life and satisfaction of media customers.

Let's suppose that in the future my "social DRM" becomes the standard for copy protection, and let's see what changes.

• Media buyers who are also uploaders will continue their "work", so the damage they do to publishers and authors will remain the same.
• Most of the media buyers who are not uploaders, but today are stripping the DRM from their files (because of the absurd limitations this imposes on them) will stop doing that. In fact almost everything they want to do with their files will be not only possible in presence of the "social DRM metadata", but also authorized.

• People who are not tech-savvy, and do not know how to strip DRM will be able to share ebooks with their friends, when they cannot do that at the moment, so increasing piracy.