[SmokeAndMirrors]

This is so ridiculous.

On the pro-DRM side of this line, this is basically what I hear: "Some people don't pirate or break DRM."

Sure. And you know who those people are? They're the sorts of people who are content to run in tiny circles within the confines of a walled garden. Those sorts of people are going to behave exactly the same way whether DRM exists or not. If you give them a tool within their walled garden that they can use to do something, they don't care if they can find it cheaper or free somewhere else: they're going to use it because that's the kind of person they are.

You don't need to chain down those sorts of people. They're not going to run anywhere anyway. iTunes remains one of the most popular media programs despite getting rid of DRM on their music years ago. Why? Because Apple people like their garden.

Everyone else?

For everyone else, they're going to have a couple bad experiences with losing their content when a DRM protocol ends support, or being unable to back up a Nook Book because the site refused to disclose the DRM and you didn't know what you were paying for, or Kindle's proprietary lock-down, and where's their next stop? Pirate Bay. And it will continue to be Pirate Bay until someone pulls their head out of their derriere and stops trying to prevent them from doing totally reasonable things like putting their own damn book on their own back-up or their own reader.

And it's only going to get worse as time goes on. I'm only 22, and what used to be a "geek" when I was in high school is now your average teenager. People are getting more tech savvy, not less, and it's going to get easier and easier to crack DRM.

Basically, DRM is totally irrelevant to proprietary users, and totally ineffective against every other kind of user.

frahse, you live in a fantasy land. It is no trouble at all to strip DRM. Once you install the plugin, you don't even have to think about it or do anything. It's easy as pie. And if you can't be bothered to install the plugin, there's a million and ten people on a million and ten torrent sites who have already done it for you, and your average Joe on the street knows at least a couple of them right off the top of his head. It's as common knowledge to anyone who has ever used the internet as Facebook.

I also have no idea why you think it's wrong for someone to strip DRM so they can use their own ebook for their own personal reading. Your moral compass is spinning, dude.

Because that's really all that DRM does. All it does is cause frustration to honest customers who paid for their books. You think it stops pirates? Seriously, where are you from?

It doesn't bother me because it's difficult to get pirated content or strip DRM. It's not. It bothers me because it's wrong. It's wrong to screw paying customers.

Whatever problems may exist in a multitude of industries as they all make the move online, DRM is obviously not the answer. It does nothing to deter pirates - it only punishes paying customers, which makes them more likely to turn to pirating, not less.

Worried about the viability of the business model? Come up with a better one. Stop trying to band-aid the bullet holes in the old one (which applied to a totally different society which we no longer live in) with increasingly insane degrees of desperate consumer interference.

Pre-internet business models are not going to work. No matter what you do. No matter how draconian you get. They just won't. This is a new age and someone is going to have to come up with something else. In the meantime, industries across the board will undergo some shaky years.

This is normal. It has happened before and it will happen again. By flailing around and lashing out at your own customers over something your non-customers did, you are doing nothing but cutting off your nose to spite your face.