Quote:
Originally Posted by Kali Yuga
That's nice. But for the second time, that is not what I'm saying.
"DRM discourages piracy" is a completely different claim than "DRM encourages piracy." I'm addressing the latter, not the former.
I fully agree that the evidence is far from perfect, that we can't construct perfect counterfactuals that would provide a definitive answer. (Of course, the stronger you demand such perfect evidence, the more you undercut your ability to claim that DRM does encourage piracy...)
Regardless of the problems of gathering evidence, the simple fact is that digital music has been sold both with and without DRM, and this does not appear to have had any significant effect on piracy rates. In fact, removing nearly all of the issues -- DRM, availability, convenience, middle men, pricing -- doesn't appear to reduce piracy rates.
As such, it is my opinion that ultimately the overwhelming majority of pirates just want Free Stuff. The alleged barriers are, in my opinion, far more about rationalization than genuine sources of discontent.
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Shouldn't the question be did sales go up or down after DRM was removed? If sales didn't go down why are they paying for it.
When Amazon started selling MP3's without DRM did their sales go down?
When Apple removed DRM from iTunes did their sales go down?