Quote:
Originally Posted by leebase
Having no DRM is pretty close to having no copyright. Copyright exists for the benefit of both content creators and society. If we don't figure out how secure IP for content creators in the digital age, we'll all be poorer.
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This is why Baen went bankrupt several years ago.
Oh, wait.
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We do need to sort out IP rights in a digital age. We may not be able to do it without a complete overhaul of copyright law, which the media production companies will fight tooth and nail against, because any serious look at the law will show huge gaps and problems, and any *actual* fixes, as opposed to more unregulated extensions, will not be in their favor.
DRM, in the current sense of "only a registered device can view this content," isn't going to work. The software isn't able to register enough devices, or allow customized settings on the registered content, and companies aren't invested in keeping the registration servers active indefinitely. And since consumers know--enough of them, anyway--that DRM means "your file is dead" when the seller goes out of business, there'll always be an incentive to crack it, just for personal use.
I'm in the group that believes the
Bagel Story is accurate... 80% or so will pay for what they get, if the price is reasonable and the content is accessible. If he'd put out a tip jar that said "Bagels: $10," I suspect he'd've gotten a lot less payments; had he wrapped each bagel in a sealed plastic container and taped it shut with strapping tape, so that you'd need scissors to open it, I suspect many people would've decided it was too much work, or that they didn't owe him a dollar for the amount of hassle he put them through. (That they wouldn't have the hassle if they ignored the bagels wouldn't occur to them.)
Baen succeeds, in part, by convincing customers it's worth paying, and by reminding them that if they don't pay, Baen can't keep giving them what they want. In a world where copies are easy--and they're never going to get harder--Authors and publishers will have to use some variant of that method.
No DRM is going to prevent digital copies: the Harry Potter books have the perfect digital DRM (you can't read legit copies on *any* machine), and yet they're widely available. Unless we wind up in the
Stallman dystopia, content is going to be shared with people who didn't pay for it. It always has been.
Authors and publishers need to figure out how much of their fanbase has never been their paid-customer base, and start working on the problem from that direction, not on the "stop people from reading what they haven't bought" idea. Most of us grew up reading books we hadn't bought.