Quote:
Originally Posted by ltr
Do you not feel that DRM reduces the lending and copying of books for the majority of the ebook reading public?
ltr
|
Yes, I am sure it does reduce lending of books between friends... something that until the advent of ebooks was considered fair use and was hardly controversial.
What DRM does not do is stop the wholesale piracy of ebooks. There are a number of sites (and they are not hard to find) that simply puts hundreds if not thousands of books on a web site that can easily allow you to download the books; DRM doesn't stop that. There are others who place hundreds and thousands more books on the torrents for people to download and share with their 20 thousand closest friends; DRM doesn't stop that either.
To put it simply many media publishers (not just book publishers, but also the people who publish DVD's, music and games) hate fair use. As far as they are concerned, a book lent to a friend is a lost sale. DRM and ultimately their goal is to get as much media into the cloud (which streaming sites like pandora, hulu and netflix are doing) as possible so that no one can ever own a copy of a book, song, movie or game every again. DRM is simply a stopping point on the way to that future.
Here endeth the Rant
.
--
Bill