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Old 06-15-2010, 05:14 AM   #2
Worldwalker
Curmudgeon
Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.Worldwalker ought to be getting tired of karma fortunes by now.
 
Posts: 3,085
Karma: 722357
Join Date: Feb 2010
Device: PRS-505
The words that come to mind are "cumbersome" and "fragile".

One of the things they just don't get: hindrance of use. I have, perfectly legitimately, a full copy of Adobe Photoshop. I also have, equally legitimately, an upgrade version of a later edition of Adobe Photoshop. However, because my original one is quite old, it isn't auto-detected by the upgrade installer, and every time I have to do a system rebuild (which has happened twice so far) I have to call Adobe to get a time-limited override code so I can install the thing. The entire process is entirely too much of a pain in the rear. Every time I face doing it again, I consider obtaining a cracked version of a product that I legitimately bought and paid for because the process of legitimately installing my legitimately-owned software is just too annoying.

If you make things complicated and annoying enough, users who would otherwise never dream of such a thing will eventually turn to illicit sources to get what they want, and when they've done it once, it gets easier and easier. That slope is not just slippery, it's got rollers on it.

As Baen has proved, if you offer a good product at a fair price, people will buy it. All else aside, people like feeling virtuous. Make your product inconvenient at best and borderline useless at worst, and sell it for an excessive (as compared to equivalent paper formats) price, and people will circumvent those things which inconvenience them. Which are, in this case, the DRM. Making the DRM more cumbersome and inconvenient, and even more fragile than it already is, will encourage even more illicit copying. Basically, it's a big step in the wrong direction.
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