Quote:
Originally Posted by HarryT
Trouble is, it really does need to be combined with strong DRM, because otherwise people will just sell their books and keep a copy for themselves anyway.
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I think a watermark with accumulating "sold-by" and "bought-by" statements on each sale transaction in the original and the sold copy could be sufficient. The seller would be obliged to remove his copy. The watermark would prevent the seller from selling an ebook twice. Seller and buyer are identifiable. This means whenever authorities get hold of a storage medium of yours with previously sold content, they've gotcha.
Ok, you could strip the watermark from your copy but this requires criminal energy which none of us can imagine. Means which DRM cannot be stripped? Then you have an illegal copy of copyrighted content anyway.
Personally, I think that keeping a copy of a sold ebook which has been read before the sale isn't of much value anyway. It will be forgotten on the shelf. However, publishers probably need to impose a waiting time period until an ebook may be resold in order to avoid a first-sell-then-read avalanche.