Quote:
Originally Posted by Harmon
I don't think that they are trying to prevent theft.
I think that the first objective is to create an ecology of ebook reading which is similar to buying a ticket to the movies. That is, they want to make a sale for each separate person who reads an ebook. In that context, what they are doing is taking advantage of DRM and, to some extent, proprietary file formats, to make it difficult for more than one person to read an ebook based on only one purchase. Not impossible - just difficult.
A second objective is to lock readers into buying from a single ebook source, each reseller hoping that the source will be itself.
All this stuff about DRM preventing theft is a smokescreen. What is being prevented is "more than one person reading per purchase" and "buying an ebook from my competitors."
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I like the movie analogy, but I think they are using software licenses as a model as well. We've all accepted the idea that when we buy software we are really buying licenses to use the software on a specified number of computers.
The trouble is, we have a long history of using books very differently--we're used to sharing them and donating them and reselling them, and "they" tell us we can't do that, and pretend it's some great gift when they enable lending for a specified period--wow!