Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
And the second-best might be... Amazon. They have developed a DRM system for the Kindle that seems to be pretty effective: They have exclusive content, you can only access their content through their reader, they get paid per download, and the customers accepts this because they like its ease, speed and reading quality. .
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Steve, your nice little pro-DRM rant completely failed to address the issue Lemurion raised, so I will repeat his quote:
Quote:
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The problem with most DRM implementations is that at least in practice they appear to have a minimal effect on preventing piracy (at best). The two things DRM seems to do well are annoy paying customers, and facilitate vendor lock-in.
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Then you go on about cable TV for a bit, blithely ignoring the fact that these days, people "pirate" TV simply by downloading the shows they want from the internet in addition to the more established signal pirating, which you seem to think doesn't exist any longer. With the advent of bittorrent, the whole issue has become moot.
As for Amazon, just wait until first time the Amazon DRM servers go down and refuse to authenticate your reader. Remember the outcry when the same happened to the
MobiPocket DRM servers? People who accept DRM that needs to talk to a third-party server are insane. By my utopian standards, of course.
And regarding "exclusive" (are you really saying that being able to buy some books only on the Kindle is a good thing? Vendor lock-in sound like fun to you?), as far as I know their content is also available in other legal formats like mobi (easily cracked and done habitually on this forum and elsewhere in the interest of format-shifting) or on the p2p networks. As long as there are alternatives available, the whole system might chug along for a while. It is when there are no other alternatives available that hacking DRM becomes an interesting proposition, and it is when there are no other alternatives available that consumers lose big time.