Quote:
Originally Posted by markbot
Property rights is one of the most important aspects of a republic.
Protecting intellectual property rights is in the US constitution, even before they mention free press. If people didn't get paid at the market rate for their intellectual property there would be far less intellectual property since people would lack incentive.
As we've seen with the music industry, intellectual property in electronic form can be successful if it has DRM.....and is a disaster without DRM. Some major music acts now make paying for their CDs optional since they know anyone under 35 can figure how to get it for free anyway.
Absence of DRM reduces the smartest and most creative people in society to hobos. This is an inverted incentive structure.
So, let's all applaud Amazon's efforts to protect the smartest and most creative people in society so that they can continue to live off of the intellectual property.
And I like how they did the DRM for the Kindle also. Looks robust.
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DRM is not good and not needed. We have a very bad tower of ebabel. You'll find books in MS Reader, eReader, Mobipocket and Sony BBeb. We will ignore PDF as it's not a real ebook format. If a book is available say in BBeB but not Mobipocket and you have a Gen3, you won't be able to purchase that ebook to read on your Gen3. DRM also treats me like I am a thief. I am not and do not want to be treated that way. Some sites that sell Mobipocket format ebooks let you enter 4 PIDs and some only allow 2 PIDs. If you have say 3 devices and want to purchase from a site that only allows 2 PIDs because the price is lower, then you either have to go to the 4PID site and pay more or give up one device. There are also cases where DRM has been known to prevent people from ever reading their ebooks again. Look at what happened to Blu-Ray. There was new DRM on some discs before the players supported it. So it was impossible to legally view those movies. The Major League Baseball website change DRM providers and all the content people had spent lots of money on in the past suddenly became useless. Mobipocket took down their DRM server to fix a possible security breach. For about 2 weeks (or so) most Mobipocket books were unavailable for purchase. Do you think these are good things? My copy of MS Reader will not read any of the DRM books I have purchased and the only way to get it to work is to strip the DRM. I think DRM is a bad idea as there are chances you'll get locked out of your legally purchased content. Look at Amazon... Anyone that needed to redownload their content because maybe the DRM needed to be updated have not been able to. The Kindle is relying on Amazon to keep a copy of all the books. DRM maostly relies on someone else. I'd rrather rely on myself.