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I'm surprised there aren't more people advocating watermarked ebooks as a good compromise between DRM and complete copying freedom. I've bought quite a few role-playing game books from DrivethruRPG over the years. The earlier ones were all DRMd PDFs, and some of those I've forgotten the passwords of and can no longer access, which is a pain. But DriveThruRPG moved to watermarking a few years ago, and those are great. They're standard PDFs, but they have my name and a serial number very tiny at the bottom of every page. I can still lend them to friends, if I want them to read a section before I run a game, for instance, but I know, and they know, that if I give away copies to anyone, or release them onto the net, it will be extremely obvious who did it. The law is still there as a deterrent to illegal mass copying, but the inconvenience to the purchaser is non-existent.
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