Quote:
Originally Posted by pdurrant
That rather depends on what you want to protect against. If you want to stop your content appearing on the internet for anyone to download, in a torrent or otherwise, you need it to be 100%.
|
If the goal is not "prevent it from reaching the torrent network," but "persuade most readers to buy it from a legit source," it doesn't need to be 100%. If authors & publishers are willing to deal with a certain amount of unpurchased reads--equivalent, perhaps, to the broke college student who hangs out in bookstores and reads while he's standing there, because the library doesn't get the most current books he's interested in--DRM doesn't have to be perfect.
Baen has no DRM; most of its the books are available on the torrent networks (good copies, even, because no cracking/reformatting is required)--yet they still sell, because it's more convenient to buy them from webscriptions.
The Lord of the Rings books sold well, and AFAIK are still selling, despite being available from the binaries/torrent networks for almost a decade.
Quote:
|
I believe this might be at the root of your misunderstanding. When we talk about DRM schemes having been 'broken', we don't mean that the encryption can be removed by anyone. It can still only be removed by the person in possession of the key to the encryption - i.e. the person who bought the content in the first place.
|
DRM doesn't have to mean "encryption that prevents the file from being opened without a software key." DRM can mean "book is imprinted with the purchaser's name & cc #." (Which can certainly be cracked & removed. However, incentive to remove that is a lot less, if the purchaser can load the book on any device, and convert it easily.)
I think the key to the DRM wars is not going to be any new tech development, but getting publishers (and some authors) to acknowledge that
not every reader is going to buy the book, and they need to focus on solutions to mass distribution that accept that a certain amount of file transferral is going to happen.
Spouses are going to share ebooks. College roommates are going to pool their resources. Book clubs are going to share books. Preventing *those* forms of sharing will inspire DRM cracking... and encourage mass distribution, because the readers are perceiving the publishers as interfering with the way books have always been read & shared.
Publishers who want to keep DRM schemes that work as "one purchase = 1 readable copy" need to find a way to transfer ownership of that copy, because book purchases have always included the possibility of "I'm done with this; here, you read it next."