Quote:
Originally Posted by Penforhire
Morlac, I do have sympathy but you should recognize that DRM as a method to prevent piracy is a failure. If someone wants to pirate your books they can do so off the sweat of some hacker's brow followed by the least of efforts from a file sharer.
We do not go into the distribution channels of piracy here but if someone does not want to pay for an e-book the addition of DRM does not delay its availability to anyone with an internet connection. And some of those exchange channels are easier to use than some on-line e-book stores! DRM is a more significant annoyance to legitimate buyers, not being able to read their e-books on a different device or after a DRM server fails.
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Oh, I completely recognize that as a fact. I fully recognize that no DRM solution will stop determined pirates and that most DRM annoys the user and costs the publisher even more money upfront.
I'm not looking to stop that kind of pirate. We sell to teachers, who are not really as likely, generally, to rush off to download materials for classroom use off the darknet or the latest torrents. However, there are a significant minority of educators who feel that photocopying whole books for each student is fair use. So I am considering the pros and cons of trying to discourage casual, "opportunistic" piracy.
For example, if I sell PDFs that I try to make uncopyable, *most* of those who would casually try to copy will simply say "oh, guess I can't do that." Of course, that's also going to annoy the folks who bought the book and want to transfer it to another computer for a perfectly valid reason.
For that same balancing act reasoning, I would probably NOT want to make such a PDF of our books unprintable. There's too many times when the teacher will have a reason to want to print something out and be frustrated by the blockage.