There is a much, much simpler way of approaching all these issues. Let me elaborate my logic:
Forget about digital vs paper book, DRM or clear-text, etc. Consider these premises:
(1) Special products:
Books, sound recordings (LPs, tapes, CDs, MP3s, whatever) and images (photos, paintings, etc) are special types of products: when you buy one, you buy it for the
information they contain, not for the media.
(2) Everything can be reproduced or copied. It's just a matter of time and cost. It isn't new either:
Mozart "stole" the Allegri Miserere, which was a controlled piece of religious music, by listening to it twice and transcribing it entirely by memory. But the cost to him was a lifetime of learning how to read and write sheet music. Rather a high investment just for a copy; nevertheless, the Miserere was copied. Similarly, if you're willing to learn how to paint for many years, you could have your very own copy of a Picasso painting. It's not cost-effective but it's doable - and regularly done.
(3) People who produce something must be paid for their effort, if only to give them an incentive to continue producing.
(4) There are 3 kinds people:
- The fundamentally honest no matter what: they are the ones who bring back a wallet full of cash to the police, even if it means losing the cash. They are a minority.
- The mostly-honest who do petty thefts if they can get away with it and if it's not too much hard work: they are those who see the wallet, look around to check that no-one is around, and pocket the cash. They are the overwhelming majority of people.
- The thieves: they are the one who don't wait for wallets to drop onto the street and come pick them out of people's pockets. They are a minority.
Now, honest people aren't a problem, they're honest. Thieves aren't a problem either: whatever you do, they'll find a way to steal anyway, and there is no cost-effective way to prevent theft 100%. The real problem is this: how to get mostly-honest people to pay content producers for what they consume?
There are two ways to make it happen:
(1) Make copying difficult or long enough that it's not worth the effort or the investment over buying the genuine thing.
When LPs were the only source of music, nobody copied LPs because it's just too expensive to buy a press. In this case, the copy protection was natural.
Digital files however are intrinsically, I would even say
violently easy and free to copy. Publishers are trying to bring back cost and difficulty into the equation: they hope that DRM will be too long or too difficult to crack for the common man, and they make the law threaten the common man (which is a form of cost too, in the form of jail time to be served if you get caught).
Neither scheme works, because DRM is never 100% secure by definition, and legal threats are too diluted by the sheer mass of people engaged in copying.
(2) Make the genuine article better than the copy, so that people have an incentive to pay for the better product.
When magnetic tape (cassette, VHS or otherwise) was common, people could copy music or movies onto a tape, but with a certain loss in quality. Folks with low income did that a lot, and ended up with free but pretty crappy copies of copies of copies. Folks with more disposable bought the better, officially-sanctioned copy at the store, and everybody was happy, including publishers.
However, again, digital files change the game: they are also
violently identical to the original master copy. Even multiple copies of an original encoded with a lossy compression degrades in quality only once. Several schemes have been tried to prevent lossless copies of protected content, for instance at OS level by Microsoft, but we all know how that went.
So, with digital files, we are left with two simple, unescapable conclusions:
- Left totally unchecked, people copy everything all the time without paying a dime. Period.
- Artificial barriers to illegal copying don't work very well because, well, they're
artificial.
We therefore need a radical new way of making premise (3) happen. In fact, it's not just fair to the content producers that they get paid, it's of great societal importance: if no-one sees a way to make a living writing, making music or making movies, our society's culture will stall!
What can we do?
- Try to educate people from the youngest age to recognize the importance of paying for what they consume - make them more honest at core, so to speak, so they'll police themselves into paying: it would require a gigantic effort in state-sponsored brainwashing for several decades, and I'm not sure it would work too well because it runs against human nature. But it's certainly a worthwhile effort.
- Try to find new revenue streams not directly associated with copies of the work: it's already happening within the movie industry and on the internet, where the content is cheap, sometimes free, and advertising makes up a sizable portion of the revenues of the content producer. In the music world, musicians often make a lot of money by selling seats to live concerts, something that can't be copied I'm not sure how this would apply to the world of books however.
- Some radical new paradigm to allow writers to make a living in a world of free unstoppable copying. I must admit, I've been thinking about the problem for years, and could not come up with an answer.
So you see, more questions than answers. My personal response is to put myself voluntarily in the group of honest people, but it's not a global, sustainable answer to the problem. All I know is, we all need to think of a way to free ourselves from the stranglehold of DRM and old business practices, while at the same time allowing talented authors to be richly paid for their talent. I'm not sure how it'll happen, but it'll have to happen.