Quote:
Originally Posted by poshm
I'm not really understanding why people want to remove the DRM from ebooks? I thought that you could have DRMed books on up to 6 devices at a time which is more than what the majority of people should require surely? Or am I (probably) missing something?
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The very principle is extremely flawed. It's like buying a paper book and having to ask the store you bought it from permission to place it in a new set of hands. Then, someday that book store disappears or refuses to talk to you and suddenly you can't ever put that same book in another pair of hands.
The best part is that DRM does absolutely not one single solitary thing to stop piracy. Nothing. It fails 100% of the time. And even encourages piracy to some degree (for example, a hard-to-rip DVD because of non-standard copy protections may lead someone to just download it for their own use. That's still piracy.)
Nobody has made a completely unbroken DRM, even if it's a matter of inconvenience by way of the analog hole, and what's more, people have been pirating books by scanning paper copies THEM SELVES on release date. There are entire groups dedicated to being providers of pirated wares out there. They have been around for decades. I used to participate when I ran my BBS and didn't understand copyright at all.
So basically DRM does one, and only one thing: It stops legitimate customers from fair use of the thing they paid for. That's why it matters that DRM be strippable or not used at all. It's gullible morons that think it is somehow protecting their "property." If there is actually any business angle that is valid, it's the anti-consumer seedy angle of vendor lock-in for people who can't understand how to work around DRM.
Imagine someone who spent $500 on books for their Kindle and then a new reader comes out, like the Nook or Plastic Logic or whatever, that really entices them. Assuming they don't know about removing DRM, they're going to be afraid to even consider other options just because they can't move their media along. It's pretty ridiculous.
Oh yeah, and I forgot to mention how DRM prevents you from freely shopping around, another aspect of vendor lock-in. You can't buy a "protected" book from BooksOnBoard, eReader.com, Fictionwise, BN, etc. and use it on your Kindle without, at the very least (in the case of BoB) some amount of hackery on the file, and in most cases, you can't do it at all without stripping DRM, which, at least in the USA is technically illegal (thanks, useless DMCA.)
Okay I'm ranting again. I apologize but it pains me to see someone somehow rationalizing a meaningless useless personal limit on usage of something they paid for. That's the last kind of thought process the movement for fair use and consumer protection needs.