Quote:
Originally Posted by LazyScot
How about the lock on a shop? Or on a vending machine?
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I didn't pay for the right to to use, manipulate, give away, or destroy the shop. The issue here is that DRM is a lock on
my property, which is under the control of someone who is not me.
When I purchase a book, I gain a great deal of rights over its physical use, and limited rights over the use of its contents. Fair use allows me the right to quote it (sometimes extensively) for educational, review or parody purposes, and the right to make a transformative (but not merely derivative) work based on it. As an owner, I've got the right to shift it to a more comfortable format; I can copy it at a larger size for easy reading, or project it onto a screen if I wish. The legal property rights in the US give me the right to resell the book if I no longer wish to own it, and can find a buyer.
DRM interferes with my rights as the owner of the file. If I want my full rights as owner, I can only get them by allowing myself abilities that I don't have rights to support--the ability to make & distribute free copies, the ability to paste it all onto a webpage, and so on.
I'm not arguing that those should be part of my rights as owner. I am suggesting that publishers figure out how to separate those from the rights customers *do* have by law, because until they do, piracy will continue to grow.
Transferable DRM is a potential solution--unregister one device, register another one. It'd be a bit tricky to implement, because there would inevitably be bugs and lost files and the occasional crashed device, and people would complain. However, it'd be possible, and could be made to work quickly & easily for most cases.
The DRM systems already have ways of doing this; they just discourage it, because they don't want to allow selling or even giving away ebooks to a new owner. They want to use DRM to enforce "1 purchase = 1 reader," which they aren't entitled to by law.