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Originally Posted by DuneSoldier
If you are saying that the iPod led to a greater demand for generic MP3 players then I understand your point. If that's the case then we might see something like that for eBooks fairly soon.
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Yes, that's essentually what I was claiming. I think the next generation of Kindles (or whatever comes along that's the equivalent, if someone happens to beat Amazon to the punch) could be that 'iPod of ebook readers". When that happens, it reaches the next level, where sales of ebooks go up, and thus, piracy goes up. But ebook piracy is a bit more dangerous for the consumer than music piracy, because, as I said, there's no easy way to put a paper book in digital format. At the point where they see widespread piracy, publishers could simply withdraw their ebook offerings altogether. It would be no different than withdrawing support for any other format in another media (e.g., the demise of HD-DVD in favor of Blu-Ray). At that point, consumers go back to where we were pre-Kindle: People scanning books to get them to e-book format, distributing them without DRM, but on a much smaller scale than they could be distributed with the publishers' cooperation.
Quote:
Originally Posted by DuneSoldier
I don't see how you can get away from platform dependency and still have DRM. DRM is different than regular encryption as there is only really one trusted party. There will never be an actual DRM standard. As soon as you publish a DRM standard anyone who duplicates it has violated the DMCA.
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Well, I think if you publish a DRM standard (assuming you're the one who devised the DRM), you're not in violation of the DMCA. The DMCA is aimed at protecting DRM, not in preventing it from being distributed. (i.e., the idea is to prevent DRM from being broken.)
More to the point, it's not true that DRM can't be cross-platform. Encryption is just an algorithm, and algorithms can be copied between platforms. It's just a matter of translating the procedure into a format that the new platform can understand, and using the algorithm in that platform. It's fairly simple to write a fuction that requests a string from a user and then compares that string to a generated product key, and then querying a website to see if that key has already been registered on a different device.
NOTE: I'm not necessarily advocating such a DRM system for e-books. I think watermarking would be sufficient for the publishers' purposes of preventing widespread distribution of works. Watermarking
is a form of DRM, because it serves the purpose of discouraging piracy, just like other DRM methods. No DRM method
completely precludes piracy altogether.