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I've been thinking about books and how DRM fits in. These guys are very late to this market of electronic distribution. Books have always been the exception - they were never easy to copy nor (as we are finding now) are the first copies perfect. This is rapidly changing. It has thrust the book publishers back ten years and is forcing them to catch up. You can buy a paper book and read it anywhere. You can loan it to others. You can resell it when you are done. You can even borrow them from a library. Electronic distribution changes all of this. It now becomes very easy to make perfect copies (of the imperfect scans). Publishers don't want you to loan your ebooks to anyone. They want to limit where and how you read them. You can't resell them either. Libraries who embrace ebooks are forced to treat them the same way. This is a major paradigm shift. DRM is simply an attempt to keep things the same. I can't say that I have the answers to piracy, but I'm pretty sure that DRM isn't it.
PCH
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