Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
However, a restriction of privacy rights, and the rights you have to do what you want with your property, are not necessarily as draconian and extreme as many of the posters here seem to assume. Re-using the car analogy, you have a right to drive your car once you've bought it, but you do not have the right to drive over the speed limit, through red lights, and against traffic. These are limitations to what you can do with the vehicle you legally own (including in democratic societies), and these are accepted limitations by most, because they protect the society at-large from being run over by car owners.
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Actually, these restrictions already exist for ebooks, even without DRM. The problem is detecting such violations or enforcing compliance which is far more invasive than monitoring a busy street-crossing (which isn't unproblematic, actually) and especially the speeding radar stations, which are very focused in their purpose. Ghost driving isn't monitored at all.
I know this looks like nit-picking and I'm sorry. My problem is that situations are being confused/mixed which in this case would be making something illegal (the car thingies) vs. enforcement schemes (IP thingies) and to me this distinction is very important. There are a great many things illegal yet only a few are vigorously monitored. The car example is only true because the probability of accidents is high and thus the loss of life. In Germany and Switzerland, there's the principle of proportionality and it's this principle I continously see violated.
Having said that, I'd like to ask why we are still only focusing on DRM and surveillance rather than on other ways to maximize profits. Again, the connection between illegal and legal downloads isn't known so focusing solely on that is misguided. It's quite possible that there is a very profitable solution without any DRM or other control measures (watermarking, surveillance, etc) at all and it's also possible that there exists no equally profitable solution with DRM. We simply don't know.
So, what is your target customer base? What are typical volumes of sale per book? What kind of volumes are required at a given price? Is the ebook market actually large enough or is a celebrity status still mandatory?
The biggest problems I see for ebooks are volume, exposure and usability.
A goal might thus be to make legal purchases not less attractive as illegal downloads. The wording here is intentional as illegal downloads are typically more attractive if you ignore the illegality: you can do with them whatever you like and they're free.
One of the things I don't understand is why piracy is never a deciding factor other than with DRM? You said (or implied) that piracy is rampant. But therefore removing DRM
wouldn't change a thing other than making legal purchases less less attractive as illegal ones. After all, you only need a single cracked version for your DRM scheme to fail unless you employ vigorous surveillance or control. It doesn't matter if a pirated version is available from a hundred sources or from a thousand. Likewise, the original source doesn't matter either. At the moment, you are only harassing paying customers. This would cover usability perfectly while
not increasing piracy. So what's the point?
As for increasing exposure? Dunno really. I regularly have problems finding something to read because I just don't know what's out there.
Increasing the market is difficult to force though DRM-freeness would actually help here.