[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by HarryT

Please don't tar everyone with the same brush. It's certainly not the case that "everybody" thinks that DRM is "evil".

That's true. There are industry shills and astroturfers trying to convince us that restrictions on us are for our own good Maybe that mindset works for you. It doesn't work for me.

Digital Restrictions Management keep me from using an ebook in the same ways I can use a pbook. With DRM, I can't lend an ebook to my mother (stealing! that's stealing!). I can't sell it to the used book store when I'm done with it (OMG the author isn't getting paid twice!). I can't keep it forever unless I somehow keep my device functioning forever (I have hundred-year-old pbooks). I can't give it away to the church rummage sale (or anything else). I can't, in fact, do anything except read it in certain ways as specified by the publisher. If something should happen to that publisher -- they go under, they switch DRM formats, they say they can't sell that book anymore, they decide they don't want to do business with me anymore (and all of these things have happened) -- at the very least, I can never read that book on anything but the years-outdated device I had at the time, whatever it might be, and quite possibly (Amazon has done this) they could just take the book away entirely, right out of my house and off my shelf.

Authors survived and produced books, prolifically in fact, for centuries without publishers being able to prohibit lending, prohibit resale, and compel repeated purchases of the same content. But with ebooks, the publishers see a chance to go to the "one book, one reader" model, and really want the "one book, one reader, one time" model -- they want you to rent books like you rent movies.

Would you buy a DVD that you could only watch on the TV you own now? If you get a new TV, you'd have to buy all your DVDs, at least the ones you want to watch, over again. Would that work for you? That's what DRM is.

That's why I don't buy DRM-locked ebooks, no matter how badly I want them. If I want a book that bad and I can't buy it electronically in a usable format, I'll just do what I've been doing all my life and buy the paper one. Sure, I'm short on space, but that's nothing new; I have a lot of practice in dealing with that, or at least moving stacks of books out of the way.

If you've ever wondered about my .sig and what the connection is between DRM and DDT, it's simple: ever see an ad for a "pest management" company? Did you expect that they would teach your cockroaches to dance the cha-cha or teach your fire ants to march in formation? Hell no; you expect them to eradicate the bugs, or come as close as humanly possible. DDT (referred to because it's commonly known by a TLA) exterminates things, not "controls" them, or at least that's the idea. DRM is "rights management" that works just like "pest management": it exterminates your rights. With pbooks, you have the right to lend them to anyone you want; with DRM ebooks, you don't. With pbooks, you have the right to keep them and use them forever; with DRM ebooks, you don't. With pbooks, you have the right to give them away or sell them when you're done; with DRM ebooks, you don't. And they want to charge you more for this. DRM manages rights like DDT manages pests: fatally.