Quote:
Originally Posted by Steve Jordan
Granted: In its present form, e-book DRM is not an effective method of loss mitigation. But unlike many people on these forums, I believe that that fact can change in time.
[...]And companies are trying to devise new methods as we speak, because they don't see an alternative.
My concern is that there are other methods of DRM that someday may be devised, that will turn out to be very effective... and a pain in the a$$ for everyone on both sides of the table. I worry that if the e-book market does not find another way to effectively sell e-books, we'll get stuck with it, whether we like it or not.
Saying "It sucks, so forget it" won't make DRM magically go away. We need alternatives to DRM that will be acceptable to both sides of the table, so DRM can finally be put to rest.
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I agree companies will keep trying to look for ways to "protect" "their" electronic content against threats that may or may not exist.
Postulate perfect DRM: unbreakable, "future-proof", owned by a single or consortium of companies, the majority of electronic content produced burdened with it.
The losses to all of us are hard to oversee: I do not for one moment believe that corporate entities like that are EVER going to be willing to release content to the public domain, we'll see what is happening now: companies will just "sit" on the content (who knows, it might become profitable again someday), try to extend copyright terms indefinitely (not a new thing), and if they go belly-up, the content goes down in flames with them.
Bleak? Very. And of course, even if we do find an acceptable alternative to DRM, there is no guarantee that some bean-counter in a corporation won't think the whole DRM-deal is more profitable and go ahead with implementation anyway. That is the problem with corporations: you are not dealing with reasonable people, you are dealing with soulless entities aimed solely at making a profit.
That said, I do not believe this "perfect" DRM exists: it is only feasible if you give them control over the content, the hardware, and all the steps in between. Which would be terminally stupid, from both the consumer's as the content creator's point of view.
And in the case of books, unless we go to a 100% ebook world which I don't see happening anytime soon, there will always be the paper book, a band saw, a high-throughput scanner, OCR, and dedicated pirate proofreaders. The quality of these pirated products will only rise over time as scanning/OCR technology gets better and people stuck in this bleak future get 'behind the cause'.