Quote:
Originally Posted by rkomar
Sooner or later, the bozos in the DRM business will figure out how to do it right (i.e. make it practically unbreakable by the average Joe).
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Earlier I have noted a couple of things in passing: Review your Windows licences and think about what would happening if publishers were owned by someone like Microsoft or Google; and I questioned what people thought of the agreement they made to access these forums. These two lines of thought come together in online applications.
One of the reasons why forums like this are able to enforce their rules is the fact that they have an useful stick. Cause them too much trouble and your account is closed - simple.
Now take a look at the software industry. They are all thoroughly loving all these new "connected" devices like the Kindle, the iPhone etc, because for most people that means getting locked into a particular
service. If Microsoft can migrate people to online versions of Word etc then copyright enforcement is so much easier for them: because, by providing software as a service, they have the stick of being able to withdraw that service. For years I've been encouraging clients to use Terminal Servers for much the same reasons, security is so much easier to manage and enforce.
Where I could imagine ebooks going is the ability to only be able to read it using online applications. For relatively open readers like the Sony this wouldn't stop clever people from creating software to capture a book as you scrolled through (although the result could be much like a photocopy of a paper book in terms of quality), but it would quite likely could put a stop to the more casual strip-n-copy spoken of here. I can see movies eventually going much the same way.