Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Why do you spend money on a lock for the door of your house? I would guess that the answer is "to deter casual thieves". Your door lock won't deter a professional criminal, and neither will DRM stop a professional criminal from copying a DRM protected book, but it perhaps deters the casual petty thief.
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I spend money on a lock for my door because the things inside will be gone if they're taken. If someone could come along, take a copy of my things and leave the originals completely intact, then for everything except the most private things people are free to copy away.
In other words, your analogy fails because you're talking about deterring people that steal physical things while DRM is about deterring copy-making.
If I copy a CD, does the music-industry lose any money? No, they don't. In fact, they don't lose anything at all since they have as many resources and goods as before I made the copy. The only way you can make the case that I'm incurring a loss on their part is if you equal my copying of a CD to actually taking a CD from them without paying - but this is obviously not the case. I might never have had any intentions of purchasing the CD but seeing as I could get my hands on a copy for free went for that - in which case there isn't a loss in sales because there wouldn't have been a sale in the first place.
DRM is about stopping making of copies. I can see two reasons for it, off the top of my head: 1) to try and annoy more or less legitimate users into going/staying legitimate, or 2) trying to make sure that pirate users can't actually use the content they're copying. DRM fails horribly at both in most if not all situations we have seen involving computers.
Regards
Fake