Originally Posted by bhartman36
It's partially a semantic argument, but only because words have meanings, and those meanings have implications.
In the case of BitTorrent (and Pirate Bay, specifically), there's nothing being put in a shared space. The file resides on the seeder's hard drive, and it's copied, bit for bit, to the recipients' hard drives. It's not being shared. It's being copied.
The fact that DRM-free content works for music (now) doesn't necessarily mean that it will work for ebooks (now).
The primary reason that DRM-free music works is because the hardware involved (primarily, the MP3 players) became easy enough to use, and the associated software (including the MP3 format) became good enough for consumers to easily download, store, play, search, manipulate (e.g., normalization), and catalogue their music -- with standards that were developed.
Ebooks, by contrast, have very few of those things. The reader hardware is good, but not necessarily great, and it's relatively expensive. Ebooks can come in several different formats (not including DRM formats), and there are metadata issues. Don't get me wrong: I love my Kindle, but there's a distance to go yet, before ebook readers will be ready for the masses. (The introduction of color e-Ink will obviously be a huge step in the right direction, as would the ability to have a light of some kind built-in to the book, which so far has proven difficult for e-Ink devices.)
On top of all this, DRM-free e-book experiments have not gone all that well. Consider what happened with Stephen King's The Plant. And that was Stephen King, who doesn't usually have problems getting people to pay for his books.
That's an oversimplification. Like any other technology, DRM is only "evil" if you want to do something the DRM wasn't designed for. I have a TiVo that uses DRM, but the files it produces can be used in a lot of places, including other people's devices (although not TiVos) if I choose to let them use them. The DRM is simply a watermark that lets content providers know where a file came from, to discourage people from going to The Pirate Bay and "sharing" the video to 10,000 of their close, personal friends.
MP3's were never delivered by the MP3 Fairy. The technology to rip music is what produced the motivation for selling music online. If anything, the download sites hindered the adoption of open formats by the music industry. Do you seriously believe that the record industry would've been skittish if WinAmp existed, but not Napster? The technology to exchange files online existed long before p2p did. p2p simply made it less painful to do so.
I agree with you in part. The old model of selling a whole CD at a time, without letting consumers hear most of the songs first, is dying, if not dead. But no content provider with two neurons to rub together would put out more content or service, knowing full well that they'll get less in return (again, see what happened to Stephen King). From a business standpoint (and anyone who is selling their books, or representing someone who is selling books, is in it as a business), that would be suicidal.
1) I can almost guarantee you that there is not currently "subbstantial ebook piracy". There is some ebook piracy, but it won't be substantial until the masses want to read electronic texts. Ebook readers quite there yet. While the Kindle has done fairly well, it's not, in its current incarnation, "the iPod of ebooks", so to speak. Widespread piracy will come with ebook popularity, if it gets that far, just like it did with music.
2) In regards to "damaging the market", there's nothing to "prove". Every time a person downloads a book that is under copyright and is being sold, that's another sale the author and publisher don't get. You can't even make the argument, like you can for music, that people can try a part and buy the rest if they like it, because ebooks are continuous works. (And in fact, selling by the chapter is the method that Stephen King tried for "The Plant").
3) Publishers have learned from the music industry. That's why you see them protecting their intellectual property now, before it's too late. Remember: DRM was a response to piracy for the music industry (which should have learned the lesson well from the software industry, but didn't). It started with copy protection on CDs, and then moved to copy-protection on music store files, once the music industry realized that copy-protected CDs weren't going to sell. It was the rejection by consumers of DRM'd CDs that backed the music industry into a corner. Because consumers rejected copyprotected CDs, there was no way for the music industry to stop the bleeding, other than selling music online. (If you can't sell a copy-protected CD, you can't prevent people from ripping to MP3, so you might as well give them a digital file.) The final leap to MP3 format (for most online music stores, at least) was the pressure of sites like eMusic.com, that did sell MP3 files (albeit from indie/less popular artists), that took the first step into the MP3 sales arena, and offered better quality sound (and certainly better tagging) than you could get for free.
Ebooks will be able to circumvent some of that experimentation (e.g., there's no need to copy-protect paper books, since the barrier to copying is so high in the first place), but some vendor is going to have to be the first DRM-free vendor to really make a success of it, before things start moving in the DRM-free direction. That won't happen until ebook readers are more than a niche product, which they still are, at this point.
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