To: HansTWN
> this hatred of "evil corporate entities" comes from. Didn't even know "Das Kapital"
Das What Kapital?! Attempts at forcefully (by DRM or otherwise) keeping the customer away from competition is anathema to the free market.
To: PKFFW
> Firstly, your belief is that piracy does not do any economic harm.
> As this hasn't actually been proven
Proven - no. But it does have -some- supporting evidence. The biggest problem with this evidence is that nearly all of the studies on piracy limit their subject specifically to music. Studies on illegal music downloads suggest that the actual economic effect is at worse a mixed bag. Books however are sufficiently different to dismiss that evidence. To my knowledge, the only study so far addressing e-books was the O’Reilly one.
The PPT stack of their presentation you can find here:
http://assets.en.oreilly.com/1/event...esentation.ppt
Basically, they say two things:
1. There were very few pirates downloading the books in their sample set during their observation period.
2. They need larger sample set to be more certain.
For all that it's worth - this matches my personal experience. The amount of stuff out there is quite huge. Surprisingly few are seeding/downloading it. Or at least were, when I last checked.
> So you've just made the decision that you might not find
> what your want legitimately so you wont even bother trying?
Nope. I was not talking of myself there. I was talking of a hypothetical new customer (friends & family, right?) to the e-book market. The first place they are likely to find something they are interested in is eithe gutenberg or darknet. Which is a problem, no?
Anyhow. This discussion with you is quite fun but it as far as truth-seeking is concerned, it misses the point. The key difference between us is not whether I am a freeloader or not. Or that whether piracy does harm or doesn't. The key difference between us is that you believe DRM is put on content because someone somewhere thinks it is effective against piracy.
I have problems with that belief and those problems are -not- limited to the basic assumption being false (that DRM actually -is- effective against piracy). Quite aside the effectivenes problem, can your belief explain following phenomena:
1. Why is it that there is no e-book reading device that supports more than one DRM-scheme? For a hardware manufacturer, it would be a huge advantage against their competition if their device supported as much of the commercial content as possible. It would be technically trivial to do that. Yet it is not happening. The new Opus gadget for example, comes in two versions - one with prc support, one with epub. They have software for both formats running on the same hardware. Yet they are not selling you a device that supports both. What causes them to piss away that advantage?
2. Why is it that amazon, the owner of mobipocket, purposefully made their kindle format incompatible with existing DRM-ed content - prc being the dominant DRM format at the time of kindle's launch?
3. Why is it that the first thing the gemstar bizdev cockroaches attempted to do to the rocketbook software suit was to remove capability to import third party content?
If these (and similar) points cannot be explained away with anything to do with piracy, then I think your belief has a problem.
The real reason all this is happening is not piracy. It's a bizdev reason - to lock the customer into buying his content only from the company store. The reading hardware is expensive. If you can make it so that any given piece of hardware can display commercial content only from -your- store, then your customer would need to shell out another investment for some other piece of hardware if he wants to buy content from someone else. This is what they are doing with DRM.