Quote:
Originally Posted by kovidgoyal
The self evident fact that a copy without DRM is superior to a copy with DRM in terms of functionality and long term use....
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Please re-read my full post.
The belief that "DRM incites piracy" is contradicted by the rise of DRM-free commercial services accompanied by no changes in piracy rates.
Again: Apple, Amazon, eMusic and others have offered DRM-free music for about 2 years now, yet people still pirate those tracks. Radiohead offers a 320k MP3 or a CD-quality WAV file straight from their website, yet it's right there in the torrents.
For example, O'Reilly does not use DRM, and I can download a torrent of 352 O'Reilly books in, oh, 30 minutes.
O'Reilly believes that the lost sales are a better option than paying for advertising and marketing. They may well be correct (though they state they don't have enough evidence to definitively extend this beyond their own audience). As a result, there isn't much strong evidence to suggest that the piracy rates are actually lower specifically because O'Reilly chose not to use DRM.
There are other examples, including Radiohead's "In Rainbows." (Yeah, those guys again.
) They released the album independently, without DRM, and for whatever price the downloader wanted to pay -- including nothing. Yet it was still downloaded illegally (or if you prefer, "infringingly") over 500,000 times via P2P in its first week. It's still unclear if that cost them sales, but it is quite clear that merely offering DRM-free content is not sufficient to discourage people from pirating.