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Originally Posted by Harmon
The purpose of DRM is not to deal with pirates. Pirates break DRM for breakfast. They laugh at DRM.
The purpose of DRM is to erase the fair use rights of the non-pirating public under the copyright law. Rights that are clearly ours under the copyright law are foreclosed through the back door of DRM, because DRM keeps us from exercising them.
For instance, you have a clear right under copyright law to move media from one environment (television) to tape (VCR.) But DRM can prevent it. You have a clear right to take a Kindle book and move it to your Sony to read it. But DRM prevents you from doing so. If you are a teacher, you have a clear right to take a chapter from a DRM protected ebook, and distribute it to your students to read on their computers. But DRM prevents you from doing it.
Piracy may, indeed, be stealing. I tend to agree with you on that, but I have some reservations when I consider Cory Doctorow's observation that artists operate in their technological environment, and the technological environment of the 21st century has, at its core, free and open copying. That's how the internet works.
It is entirely possible that the concept of "piracy" is obsolete under our emerging technological conditions. In a world where water is hard to find, it could be a crime to fill your canteen. In a world where it rains all the time, the concept of a canteen makes little sense.
But don't kid yourself. We would have DRM even if every person in the world refused to pirate.
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Ding ding ding we have a winner. Best post in the thread.
DRM has absolutely zero to do with piracy.
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I've thought that if I were an author, I might regard the pirate sites as one of my reseller sites. I'd put my website in every book, asking that if the reader enjoyed the book, go to the website & drop a few bucks in my tip jar. And on my website, I'd link to PayPal, and when someone dropped me some pennies, I'd link them to the pirate sites, saving myself for having to store the ebook on my own site, at my own expense, paying for the downloading bandwidth.
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You keep making all this sense you are going to kill the thread.