I had hoped that we might see a slow move towards so-called Social DRM. After all, the industry has not collapsed despite Apprentice Alf. Nor have Vendors/Authors choosing not to use DRM been bankrupted.
Instead, current indications are that encryption type drm is not going to vanish anytime soon. The following link is to a story from Nate's Blog, The Digital Reader:
http://the-digital-reader.com/2016/0...adc-ebook-drm/
This refers to Sony's relatively new DRM system, which as far as I know has so far neither been cracked nor reverse engineered.
However, the first comment to that post is by a developer working on something called Readium LCP. This is the first time I have come across Readium, an open source project. I was quite surprised to read this Developer's description of Readium LCP as:
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the open-source standard DRM being developed for EPUB3
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My first thought was "Open source DRM?" A look at the FAQ on the project's web page seems to indicate that licensees will receive:
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in a very secure process, certain secret “keys” which will enable the operation of the DRM. Those keys will be distributed in a very secure way by a third party - NOT the Readium Foundation.
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The answer to the question as to whether the source code will be made available is "Yes. With some caveats". I take this to mean that at least some of the source code relating to the DRM will not in fact be made available.
Personally, whilst I understand the reasons why such a project may like to offer DRM, I find the whole concept of "open source drm" to be an abomination. Is there really such a thing? Can it truly be called open source if not all of the source code is made available?