Quote:
Originally Posted by Peter Sorotokin
That story is much more complex then this site presents it.
Do you distrust all vendors who support DRM, then?
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Which part is more complicated? That in the days prior to 9/11, federal agents, rather than answer calls about, you know, 19 dudes in Florida who were learning how to fly planes but not land them, instead at the behest of one corporation that made shoddy software, attended a hacker convention, arresting the guy that proved it? Or that after Dmitry, no one else has even thought of trying this move for books? Or, that Adobe backed off from this after the damage was done, and a jury found Dmitry not guilty and the law abhorrent?
I'll confess I don't worry too much about DRM per se, as after all the outcry over Dmitry was such that the Library of Congress approved anti-circumvention exemptions to the Digital Millenium Copyright Act specifically for books.
However there is still very much the possibility that Adobe DRM, an absolute market failure in the wake of Mobizon, can still be used to lock out players from educational markets. But of course you'd need the power of regulation to do that, something that can only be achieved by whispering campaigns and astrotrufing, and not, say, by having programmers do any actual programming. Not that Adobe doesn't love the little guy, but, of course, your own vice president is on record trashing the achievements of self-publishers.
http://blogs.adobe.com/billmccoy/200...ublishing.html
That Astroturfing might be a fear of mine, but then, a former IDPF head, now with Adobe, was just caught lying to a semi-influential mailing list about Amazon's Epub support (Mobizon supports OEBPS 2.0 as a conversion source, like everyone else, and in fact Mobi was the first major ebook software company to do so.):
http://toc.oreilly.com/2008/04/keep-...play-nice.html
Now, with your programmers so busy chatting up folks on blogs, there might be a few weaknesses in the software itself. But that's OK, as despite the fact that, you know, in the age of $5 1 GB SD cards, Adobe's software chokes on a couple hundred K of text, we're told that it's "best practices" to chop every book up (even classics like Moll Flanders or Tropic of Cancer that don't have chapter breaks):
http://blogs.adobe.com/digitaleditio...igital_ed.html
The above site is perhaps my favorite little bit of deception, as of course this failing of Adobe's makes all other means of creating .epub files (the DAISY Pipeline, Mischa's OEB2Epub, whatever Bookglutton's running) untrustworthy... but of course that's the fault of the user, not Adobe.
I'd have more, but the O's might just mount a comeback.