Quote:
Originally Posted by WT Sharpe
Piracy is stealing. It is unethical, immoral, and illegal. A crook’s a crook, and a low-life’s a low-life. Theiving, criminally-minded scum are the reason the rest of us are forced to contend with the evils of DRM.
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Idiot corporations with no capacity for history are the reason the rest of us are forced to contend with DRM. The ebook industry could have saved everyone a lot of time and trouble if they'd just studied the music industry's gaffes before walking down the same destructive path.
Can you think of a single DRM scheme that has prevented piracy? I certainly can't. So while thieves and criminals--who don't mind violating the DMCA at all--get past the DRM in moments, paying, law-abiding customers have their libraries held hostage, at the whims of companies who may well abandon servers and formats and software and hardware; or simply fail to support superior systems as they come about. DRM hurts consumers, it never hurts criminals.
It continues to exist because outlets want you to use their readers and their stores, and make it as hard as possible for you to switch. If your entire library was bought from amazon, and you fall in love with a new ereader from someone else, you have to ask yourself, do I love this new tech enough to repurchase/lose hundreds of dollars worth of books? The bigger the barrier there is to you switching, the less likely they are to lose a customer to someone. It's anti-competitive in a big way, but it doesn't help authors or artists.
In the meantime, I keep waiting to hear about how the switch to free and clear mp3s has destroyed the music industry. I suspect the freedom and lack of confusion about what devices people were allowed to use to listen to their music has probably had a positive effect on sales, while funds that would go to ever more draconian protection schemes can instead be used to actually punish and prevent piracy (law suits didn't stop piracy, but there was plenty of evidence it had a chilling effect reducing online sharing dramatically).
DRM is more to blame for piracy than open source culture. If you punish paying customers enough, they're not going to want to be your customer anymore. DRM-free, open formats are the best thing that could happen for authors and the companies who promote them and distribute their work. The only downside is for B&N, Sony, and Amazon, who have to actually do something useful to earn your business instead of holding your content hostage.