Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
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He's basing the article more off the fact that if piracy isn't addressed, it might be possible to download every New York Times Bestseller for the last 10 years in an hour or less. For free.
However optimistic you may be about human behavior, it's slightly irrational to presume that the effects of that capability will be purely beneficial. Again, that does not seem to be the case for the music industry so far, which has faced lost sales year after year after year, despite offering DRM-free content for about 2 years now....
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Technology advancements kill some industries and create new ones. Get used to it.
The software industry faced the problem of piracy way before the music and publishing industry. At first they tried going draconian, some even using hardware dongles. Now that the dust has settled, they have all moved away from draconian DRM methods and are still doing robust business.
The music industry is starting to figure it out, too, albeit you can still hear the irate calls of a few dinosaurs.
Now I guess is the turn of the publishing industry.
But they (and the author of this pointless article) forget that the ease of downloading also encourage spontaneous purchases.
Case in point: I just purchased 5 ebooks from Amazon last night. All but one were books I already have (mostly in hardcover). I could probably have found at least some of them on darknet after a few minutes of searching. Ironically, I will probably not read 4 of the 5 anytime soon, since I have already read them.
But I was browsing and in the excitement of finding titles I liked in the past (like Heinrich Boll's The Clown), it was easy to click the "Purchase with 1Click" button. So, the publishers and the authors got a few $$ which they may not normally have gotten -- simply because it was easy to buy and download.
Now,
I must emphasize that I personally would not have made these, or most other ebook purchases I have made, if I could not easily strip the DRM. I simply would not spend the money to buy a title, if I cannot keep it when I change devices or platforms.
In fact, if I could not strip the DRM so easily, I may have spent the time to scour the darknet, looking for liberated copies. And I am not the only one.