[dgatwood]

Here's my perspective as a someone who writes about computer security. DRM is a hopeless concept. With real computer security, encryption is used to hide information from people who don't have the decryption key. With DRM, by contrast, Eve and Alice are the same person—you have the data, and to be able to view it, you also must have the key, and the only thing between you and the unencrypted data is software that tries to hide the key where you won't find it. It is a fundamentally unsolvable problem—what we in tech call "security through obscurity".

Worse, DRM causes significant harm to consumers. Ask anyone who bought music protected by Microsoft's PlaysForSure DRM whether they will ever buy DRMed content again. It's not just about being unable to change platforms. Eventually, every DRM scheme gets replaced by a different one, and for server-based DRM, this poses a serious problem: the company eventually shuts down the servers. When they do, you're no longer able to authorize the content on a new machine, or worse, are unable to play the content even on existing machines.

As the software industry mostly learned back in the 80s, copy protection is a hopeless cause. The only copy protection that typically goes uncracked for more than a couple of weeks involves hardware dongles, and even that isn't particularly effective long-term. And that's for software, which you can't copy by just photographing it.... With the exception of a few very specific situations where almost all of your sales happen in the first two weeks (mostly games), DRM rarely pays for itself in practice.

The main effect of DRM is to piss off your paying customers. The pirates will pirate no matter what you do. Your DRM will never affect them significantly, because except for that first person who cracks the DRM, the pirates never encounter it. And it isn't even all that effective against the first person. In the worst case, I could run your book through an OCR program and get a "good enough" copy in ten minutes, or a few hours if you want pictures. The entire notion of using copy protection for text is beyond absurd. And that's reality.