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Originally Posted by slayda
IMHO, reducing the pirates profit is the only workable solution.
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Interesting theory, slayda, but I'm not sure that profit is what's driving this kind of "piracy."
I remember that when Harry Potter #6 came out, it was scanned, OCR'ed and posted in under 24 hours (like 12?). It was posted free, and cost a fair amount of effort but it was spread over a number of folks. Profit obviously didn't drive that, 'cause there wasn't any. So cutting out the profit wouldn't work there.
So what did drive it? I think part of it was bragging rights, those folks feel they can strut a bit because of being part of that. But part of it was also that there is a demand for e-versions of such books as HP. Part of it was also that folks wanted the book
now, and didn't want to wait for their Barnes & Noble to release it at their local midnight, or in a month or so when it got to their country.
So here's a scenario, What if they had also released it as an e-book at the same time? Those desparate buyers would have never waited for someone to scan the rascal or break the DRM and post it, they'd've all crashed the servers at 12:00:01 GMT trying to
buy it at the same time! Okay, add more server capacity, and viola, you
can't sell out of copies, you have virtually
no shipping costs for those copies, and you haven't lost a single sale to these "Robin Hood" style pirates.
I really think that a lot of e-book piracy just isn't driven by profit, because nobody seems to actually
sell the pirated copies. However, I admit to not having tried very hard to find such copies, so I could just be totally unaware of a burgeoning black market in e-books all around me.
I would
love to have the HP series electronicly, BTW, they'd be so much more comfortable to hold that way. I'd consider re-buying them in e-version, if they offered one and the prices were reasonable. But I don't suppose that Ms. Rowling or Scholastic, Inc. (the publisher) are enlightened enough to read MobileRead. (sigh)
I'm reluctantly coming to the opinion that DRM that isn't too onerous (whatever that means, but it has to include allowing reselling & giving away) is probably necessary. If it's just as easy to buy your own, reasonably priced copy as break the DRM, I think that most folks will buy a copy. That's why I came up with what yvanleterrible dubbed the "solid-state e-book" idea, in the first place, it could be a pretty solid DRM that didn't impact reselling or lending in the slightest. I'm not saying it's a perfect idea, just that it's an idea.
