[rlauzon]

Originally Posted by markiehill

To be honest i cannot see how it is possible to attract new authors to a model which does not protect their work. Having it freely available and relying on peoples honesty is a huge risk and i believe that it will not provide enough security for a lot of authors to take the risk in investing a year of their life to write a book.

And I can't see people paying money to rent an eBook while you can rent it for free at the library.

One idea that I had was this:
All works must be registered with the gov't (sort of like the way Copyright was).
Just about anyone can set up a content server. Everytime someone wants content, the server sends a message to the gov't and checks on the state of the work.
If the copyright has expired, the content is sent to the user unencrypted.
If the copyright is still in force, the content is encrypted for the user only.
(This is just to prevent one user from sharing with another.)
The content is sent to the user for no money.
A message is sent to the gov't telling them that the content has been requested by a user.
Everyone pays a Content Tax - let's say like Income Tax where it's tied to how much you make.
The gov't uses number of downloads of a work to decide how to split the money from the Content Tax. The more popular the work, the more the author gets.

Imperfect, but it's just an idea. Everyone gets content. The content is locked up only until the Copyright expires. Since all content is "free", it eliminates the need to pirate it. Content creators get rewarded based on how good their work is.

Originally Posted by markiehill

Anyway whilst we make the transition to the new world, we must embrace some form of protection for authors or they will refuse to allow their works to be published to digital media.

But that's what Copyright is for.

Unfortunately, the moment that they made Copyright extend beyond the author's life, they made Copyright disrespectful - so no one respects it.

Originally Posted by markiehill

For people who say DRM does not work, you only have to look at Sky Digital in the UK, they have the market well sewn up with DRM which works and has not been cracked, so its only a matter of time before somebody comes up with a solution that cannot be worked around.

Many experts have already proven that this will never happen. Anything locked up can be unlocked. Remember that if the device displaying the content can't unlock it to display, then the content is worthless.

I believe that it was Bruce Schneier (counterpane.com, Applied Cryptography, Secrets & Lies) who said that DRM is like encryption - but the attacker is also the recipient. It simply cannot work in the long run.