Quote:
Originally Posted by kranu
It's not that each company collaborates and decides to use their own formats and DRM. It's that every company wants to make their own format the standard. See: http://xkcd.com/927/
As for not being able to share with a friend, I sympathize. I never said that the current method of DRM is great. I just believe that it's better than no DRM at all.
The ideal DRM would protect products, without hindering legitimate users. Unfortunately, there is no foreseeable option for this. |
Companies don't want to make their own standards. We basically have two main ebook formats: ePub and Mobi. Most. important and biggest online book retailers stick to those, they are just putting a DRM protection on top of that, that's where I disagree.
An ideal DRM schema would be that one that can identify you as buyer or owner of a digital book without blocking you from being able to convert or read it on different readers.
Take for example music. We are able to play our mp3s on any player, does not matter if the player is a Sony or an iPod. We can play them regardless of the brand, don't we?
O'reilly sells book without DRM protection. Big companies can do the same if they are willing to cooperate and help the customer.
There are no statistics or real numbers showing DRM as effective tool against copyright issues.
Having DRM is not better than not having one, is worse. It is not avoiding piracy but making difficult to read ebooks without hardware or reader restrictions. It is affecting users, you ... me ...