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Originally Posted by stonetools
Some arguments against DRM that I think don't work
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I'm going to ignore 1 and 3, and concentrate on 2.
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Originally Posted by stonetools
2."The music industry still exists, so that proves that casual sharing and piracy had no effect on the music industry and maybe even helped it. Look at the success of ITunes when they shifted to non-DRM."
The music industry-, including musicians, believe that they have been severely hurt . The revenues from the music industry fell 50% since the 1990s when casual sharing/piracy of music files became widespread. Even the paper that argues that filesharing isn't the sole reason for the fall revenue agrees that file sharing contributed to at least 20 per cent of the decline-a substantial percentage.
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I think we can agree that the wide availability of unauthorised digital copies of music through Napster and other decentralised mass-distribution solutions has had some effect on the income of the music recording industry. It is hard to quantify: estimates range from a drop in income due to this unauthorised copying of 10% to 50% from the highs of around 2000.
The question is, did DRM on digital music help? The evidence is that it did not, and that removal DRM from digital music sales in no way hindered the increasing sales of digital music, through iTunes and elsewhere.
Until you can see that DRM and the availability of digital files are separate issues, we're not going to get much further.
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Originally Posted by stonetools
Now what could convince the PTB? Some ideas:
A. Some big time author puts his book out there without DRM and it becomes a best seller without large scale casualsharing/piracy.
B. Lots of regular folk become incensed about DRM and stop buyiing books as a result. Right now, they're buying DRMED ebooks hand over fist, and seem OK with DRM .
C. Some major retail channel (maybe Apple once again?) goes non DRM. (Apple could afford to do so, but what's the business case for them to do so? Dunno).
If you can think of some other ways, suggest them. The purist arguments (publishers ashould give up on DRM, because its somehow morally wrong or its against publishers' long term intersts in ways that that the publishers can't measure) aren't convincing.
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My argument isn't just that DRM is against publishers' long term interests, but that it's also against their short term interests. DRM costs them money and does them no good!
I'm pleased to see you acknowledge that publishers might eventually drop DRM. Other ways things might change is
D. A major ebook DRM service has a business, financial, or technical problem that locks lots of people out of their DRMed ebooks.
E. A major publisher actually listens to his technical people, looks at the available evidence, and realises that they can save a millions of dollars* a year by dropping DRM.
* Yes, really. Millions of dollars a year. Adobe DRM costs $0.22 per ebook. US ebook sales will be at least 200 million units in 2011. If Adobe DRMed ebooks only have 20% of the market, that's $8.8 million dollars to Adobe.