Quote:
Originally Posted by rlauzon
Ahh... In other words, "Don't complain about the size of your prison cell. It's 700 sq ft. Other prisoners get only 200 sq ft."
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Well, I
am often tempted to tell people that they are whiney little kvetches who need to man up.
But no, that's not my point here, and I can see why people have issues with vendor lock-ins. The point is that DRM is not used all that often as a hardware lock-in, particularly for ebooks.
E.g. PC games and applications often have DRM; however, the developer could care less if you run it on an HP, a Dell, a home-built computer, or a virtual machine running on a Mac or Linux host (though they will care if you run it on too many computers at once). Microsoft used DRM for its PlaysForSure content, which was not locked to a specific hardware device, as it was designed to play on multiple devices. DVD's use DRM and copy protection, not to lock you into a specific vendor but to protect content. Google's upcoming book project will use DRM, and will run on any device with a web browser. There is no reason why you can't take your iPhone app and publish an identical app for Android, Blackberry or other handheld platforms.
Apple seems to be one of the bigger offenders in this department -- e.g. initially iTunes audio tracks only worked on Apple hardware, for example -- but DRM is just a small part of that tendency. They use a multitude of techniques to control their platforms, with both positive and negative consequences. Even so, they switched their music sales to DRM-free not too long ago.
In contrast, Amazon -- whom I'm sure many people here would blast as "using DRM as a vendor lock-in method" -- sells DRM-free music, video files with DRM but does not offer a hardware device to lock it to, leaves it up to the content provider of DTP content to decide whether or not to apply DRM, and provides methods for reading their DRM-protected ebook content on a variety of hardware devices. Amazon could kill the Kindle reader today, and could still sell Kindle ebooks on a wide variety of devices, and Amazon's strategy from the start was for both the device and ebooks to separately produce profits. And of course, absolutely nothing stops you from loading up a Kindle app, a B&N app, Stanza, and a dozen other ebook apps on your PC, Mac or an increasing variety of smartphones.
How, exactly, does the above reveal a diabolical design by Amazon to lock their customers into a specific
hardware platform via DRM?
Paper books also "bake in" their own restrictions. E.g. you can't make an unlimited number of duplicates with near-zero cost and perfect fidelity; you can't restore your paper copy from a backup; you can't simultaneously read your one copy of the paper book on 6 different devices at once. And of course, the usual copyright-related restrictions apply unless the book is in the public domain. So do these restrictions define a "prison" whose "cell size" is merely a little bit larger than what you get with a DRM'ed ebook...?