Quote:
Originally Posted by Hellmark
Most people, you give them an easy to use system, that gives them quality content, and they'll time and time again use that over pirating. Why do you think iTunes is as big as it is?
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In my opinion this is the essence of the entire problem contentholders have currently. Consider the following: what is the effect of DRM?
Now, one would say it stops piracy. This means they honestly believe that, by protecting every copy ever released, no illegal copy will be available for download. Of course they are wrong - there is not a single piece of music, not a single movie, TV serie, videogame or book I could not download from various locations. Anyone with half a brain can find just about anything available legally, illegally. Does it stop piracy then? No, it does not.
Consider an brutally honest person, objecting to piracy in all its forms. Say this person wants to buy the UK version of harry potter at Amazon.com - oops! No can do sir, that version
you cannot buy. Why not, pray tell? Well my good sir, we forbid the purchasing of the UK version in the US. What is this person left to do but to obtain an illegal copy?
Consider that very same brutally honest person. He purchases a book with DRM from a lesser known retailer. Several years thereafter that reseller goes bankrupt, and our honest person has forgotten about the book on his old eReader. Years go by, and our person decides to buy a new eReader, and opts to read his old classic again. But 'lo and behold! He cannot copy his old, legally purchased classic, and the store which initially sold it to him has long since closed its servers. Far fetched? Ask anyone how succesfull they were in transferring newspaper archives from their old Kindle to their Kindle2, or how well music bought at Walmart is playable these days.
And again, our honest person can do absolutely nothing. He has no book, despite paying for it, so ends up once again downloading an copy -
and at this precise moment he becomes a pirate himself since in several countries now downloading is becomming illegal, even if you do own a copy yourself!
Piracy is not hurting the industry, anti-piracy efforts are. Without DRM, without the need to restrict sales to regions and without a central, uniform marketplace for content people are being forced to download illegal copies. Indeed iTunes is one of the very few stores that offer a very wide selection of content for reasonable prices, to my knowledge without too many restrictions on what can be purchased and where that content can be used. And poor Apple is having to fight hard to keep that right, since several publishers providing music to iTunes are already demanding more money, higher margins and more access restrictions.