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Originally Posted by Arithonne
Baen has been offering ebooks DRM free for over ten years now. I think it's pretty reasonable to assume that if they were losing money because of it they'd have stopped by now or gone bankrupt.
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You know , this has been repeated again and again on the other drm threads i've been in, so it's kind of tiresome to go over these things again. Baen is a small publisher of genre fiction . It's a niche player. It is one data point, which shows that going drm free might work in certain circumstances. You can't generalize from one data point .
Let me also add that I don't consider drm to be perfect, or even good. I think of it as a necessary evil, like car alarms, surveillance cameras, or airport shoe searches. I don't like any of those things, but I can't think of better options for dealing with the problems they were created to deal with .
Drm was created to protect authors copyright . After the fact remedies for copyright infringement don't work, period. If they worked well, there would have been no need for drm. Pretending that there is no need for copyright protection , or that after the fact remedies are effective don't really help the debate
Does drm work perfectly? Nope, but it's better than nothing, and no one has proposed a better solution. Until one comes along, successful authors are going to insist on it, I'm afraid, and they are not going to be swayed by the argument that they should unilaterally disarm because some folks feel that copyright protection schemes are wrong. It would be nice if we could move on from this impasse and discuss ways of making drm better and less intrusive of the rights of technically sophisticated consumers, but the all or nothing approach ( drm is evuuuul- totally and completely evuuul, in all it's forms) prevents that kind of discussion. Oh well... Off to bed.