Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
I am very disappointed to read this thread. People must make these decisions for themselves, of course, but personally I would hope that anyone who wishes to make eBooks a success would indicate that fact by going out and buying them from those publishers who are producing them.
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I’ve spent several hundred dollars on e-books (both DRMed and not). I’ve written to publishers who aren’t selling e-books or who are selling only in limited venues. But there are still many books I want to read which aren’t in e-book form. In at least a few of those cases I’ve bought the p-book and downloaded the pirated e-book. I have a hard time seeing how I should lose much sleep over this.
Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Illegally downloading them sends all the wrong signals to publishers and only confirms the frequently-encountered view that DRM is required because there are so many people who break the law.
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I wonder how many publishers have thought about what they’re really attempting to achieve with DRM. I see it being targeted at three distinct groups:
- Market-economy pirates
- Gift-economy pirates
- Customers
Market-economy pirates are the ones turning a profit on the distribution of ill-gotten content. Although there seems to be some amount of this happening with films, it seems unlikely that anyone is currently making a profit with pirated e-books.
Gift-economy pirates give it away, forming “darknet(s)” of freely distributed illegal content. The MS LIT DRM has been broken for literally years. Any pirate worth his sea-salt could buy an MS LIT format book, strip the DRM, and toss it on the darknet. So do they?
Hardly scientific, but I downloaded the torrents for a handful of fairly large pirated e-book libraries. All the broken DRM e-book formats are HTML-based, so I extracted just the HTML books (had ‘htm|HTM’ in the filename). From that set I took a random sample of 100 which I individually examined to see if there was any evidence they had been derived from pirating the e-book edition of the work. And the number derived from pirated e-books...
None. Every single one was obviously made via scanning and OCRisg.
My theory is that pirating books via DRM-stripping the e-book edition is literally too easy. In gift economies people gain status based upon the value of what they contribute and the effort involved in the contribution. There’s no status gained from contributing a DRM-stripped book because it requires no effort or skill. Scanning, OCRing, and proofreading is how one gains status in the e-book piracy community, so that’s how books get pirated.
So that leaves customers, the broad majority of whom do not know how to strip a book of DRM even for already-broken systems. For them any DRM scheme, no matter how trivial, will prevent their lending the book to a friend, re-reading it in future years, or re-selling it – freedoms customers take for granted about p-books.
I wonder how many publishers recognize that these are the only uses DRM impacts?
Whew, ok – rant over
