Originally Posted by sircastor
One of the problems I see in this argument is that we want to treat electronic media like print media.
The publishing industry (generalization) would like to treat ebooks like print books, with some exceptions, They want to manage:
* The means through which you get the media
* How you read the media
* What you can do with the media.
They want these things because it fills in the gaps that print books fail in. Can you blame them? From their perspective, any option they don't cover is a liability to the investment they've made in a particular work.
You can do whatever the heck you want with a print book, because it's a physical object. It used to be really easy to control intellectual property because IP (generally) only ever took the form of physical objects. You weren't receiving the property itself, just a representation of it. Without significant effort, you could really only mess around with the representation of the property you have. Quick and dirty, you could cut the binding, run it through a document feeder, and have a digital copy of it, but at the cost of the original copy, and the time expenditure. It's a lot of work... work that most people aren't willing to put in.
Ebooks represent something different. The ebook you bought is no longer just a singular representation of the Intellectual Property. The barrier to entry of reproducing, manipulating, and distributing this representation is significantly small, so you have, in effect, the intellectual property itself. DRM is a means of trying to force ebooks into the functional space of print books, without the problems.
Users want to treat ebooks both ways as well. We want to be able to loan the book to our friends, but we don't want to be weighed down by DRM so we can't "Do what we want". If there's not inherent structure for the lending (as naturally occurs with a physical book) it's compensated for. Otherwise, it's really just like scanning + printing a copy and giving it to your friend and asking nicely "Please destroy this when you're done"
I don't like DRM, but I certainly understand the need for it. Tragically, people in our society don't do a great job of naturally respecting the property of others.
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