Quote:
Originally Posted by PeterT
HOLD ON A SECOND.
Just because Copy Protection IS removed does NOT mean a person has ANY reason to pay additional fees to the copyright holder.
You are assuming that the only reason people do that is to share material with others; totally INCORRECT.
I could just as easily say that people who share a single Kindle Account with multiple people (for instance you and your wife) should pay an additional license fee as you could both read the same book at the same time.
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Two people can read a print book at the same time with each using their own bookmark. That does not violate any ethical or legal rules. However, copying all the pages in the print book crosses boundary lines which would definitely be unethical at the least.
Songs as well used to be protected on 78 rpm vinyl records. When they got to the mp3 versions, they began being copied galore. There were lots of test cases on those copies especially when they were being shared on internet sites. Apple as well used tough copy protection to secure those iTunes.
Eventually, Amazon started selling them for near $ 1.00 per song without any protection. Since it took usually 15 to 30 minutes to break protection, the vast majority stopped since it was not worth their time to break if a $ 1.00 UNPROTECTED song was now available.
eBooks are now in the same stage of development. Copying print books was long ago defeated by reams of court decisions. At a minimum I regard it as unethical to strip and copy eBooks. However, I doubt any publishers are going to pursue this problem since it is not cost effective.
Now with Amazon dropping prices on eBooks to less than $ 10.00 the time investment is getting burdensome if one places a value on their time. I believe that personal time valuation indicates wasting time on DRM stripping is simply not of value anymore.
It should be noted that the US Attorney General recently won a suit against 5 publishers PLUS Apple but not including Amazon for price fixing.
Amazon now has 10's of thousands of FREE eBooks available plus allowing lending eBooks between customers. To buy a DRM protected version of those same eBooks elsewhere and then to strip the DRIM is a TOTAL WASTE OF TIME.
Finally, the new technology which enables Facebook, Google, Amazon and the NSA to track our every move, it will very soon become easy to trace DRM stripping and locate the violators. When song publishers got the technology to trace song DRM strippers, thousands of legal subpoenas were mailed to those folks on an automated basis. Many faced huge penalties and could not afford the legal expenses to fight them.
Videos as well used to be stripped by huge numbers of people. With most videos now available for small monthly fees from Netflix and a small annual fee from Amazon stripping DRM on videos now is totally OBSOLETE.
Its even possible that Amazon may soon be considering a nominal monthly fee to read any eBooks in their inventory without buying them at all. That would reduce memory size and extend battery life on a new generation of eReaders. For folks like me, who only want to read eBooks but never save them, that would be a huge boon.
Its simply not worth it anymore to strip DRM from eBooks, songs and videos. The times they are a'changin'.