Quote:
Originally Posted by Yapyap
Of course they could. It's true that stripping DRM off a legally bought ebook gives pirates an easy way to upload and share books, but there are many, many pirated books around that don't even exist as official ebooks and never have.
The Harry Potter books were around as very good "unofficial" e-copies (PDF and other formats) years before official ebooks were made. Same goes for many other books.
If a book exists and can be viewed/read, it can also be pirated, as long as someone wants to do it and has a scanner or a camera. DRM is not an obstacle to pirates or pirate sites; DRM is only something that inconveniences people who buy their books honestly and want to keep personal backups, transfer their legally bought book to a different brand of reader and maybe - maybe - share a copy with a good friend or sibling, much like they did in the days of paper books, not upload and "share" with the entire world.
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How would you protect the rights of authors and publishers to collect revenue for the use of their products?
Should authors work for nothing? Should publishers simply go out of business?
The answers affect eBooks, songs, movies and games.
Steam has solved the problem for games. There is NO DRM on their games. You can backup your game but it cannot run unless you receive an unlock file linked to your PC from Steam.
If you upload that game file to a "sharing site," no downloader can use it. So far as I know no one has been able to defeat the Steam method for games.
Maybe Amazon should adopt the Steam practices for their eBooks. Maybe those 9 digit license numbers now being planted by Amazon in the metadata of their song files is the first step to an alternative to conventional DRM. Maybe Amazon will come up with an unlock file analogous to the Steam unlock files which will be linked to those 9 digit license numbers.
No matter what happens authors DESERVE their fees and so do the publishers who represent them. Remember, the buyer only receives a LICENSE to read the eBook file. He has NOT purchased OWNERSHIP rights to the software or the data file. That differs from the rights of purchasers of print books where they OWN the physical book after they pay for it. However, even in those cases, the purchaser does NOT own the rights to copy that book or re-publish it in his own name.