Quote:
Originally Posted by frahse
I see a lot of misunderstanding where people don't know how and why things are done in the book world. People, whether authors, publishers, sellers, buyers, robbers, legitimate borrowers, resellers, lenders, all have their reasons for doing what they do, and many times resent others who aren't sympathetic to their decisions.
I just saw an article about cell phones, texting, and new methods of avoiding the high texting charges which had a quote worth repeating here.
"Zero is a really compelling price point."
I dare say that there are few people that will turn down something free, or even very cheap if they don't personally have to take a risk to steal it.
Others will glory in their successes at thwarting the rules and the laws.
All will give excuses, and find reasons for their actions, and among their peers or co-conspirators will find ready acceptance and even applause.
Years ago, when I thought to see if some work I had been dabbling in since middle school would be accepted by a Publisher ... <snippity snip snip>
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SMS/cell phone texting is a super bad example if you want to talk about what something's worth. SMS by definition should be free. It only exists because there were a few unused corners of the GSM specification that could be leveraged to store ~160 characters of 7-bit-encoded, packed text. Thus as long as there's still GSM phone service available, texting is available without any other expense to the carrier. Most of Europe historically has free texting because the cell phone companies didn't figure out that texting was actually worth something until it was too late. When GSM made its way outside of Europe, carriers started charging for SMS texts (and ridiculous rates -- $0.10/text for something that costs the carriers nothing is insane). They can't really take that away from Europeans anymore, but they set the precedent with Americans and others that "SMS is expensive".
As for the rest, it has nothing to do with DRM, other than the very bit at the end where you say you generally do whatever your publisher tells you to (Publisher says we'll use DRM: OK).