|
Hey, I have an Atari 2600!
What =X= said about leasing versus buying is one reason I will not buy DRM-restricted ebooks, especially when they are twice the price of paper books which I have full ownership of.
DRM leaves you at the mercy of whoever is controlling the authentication, of software changes (such as stealth patches) which can remove device registration and/or access to books, and of technical failures of all types.
People who want to pirate books just strip the DRM and put the book on the darknet (or skip the ebook phase entirely and scan/OCR a pbook). They're happy.
People who don't think that legality always tracks precisely with right and wrong strip the DRM on their ebooks. They're satisfied.
People who dutifully obey the law, or who don't have the technical know-how to strip DRM, suffer (and post about it on MobileRead). They're miserable.
Isn't this exactly the opposite of the way it should be? Shouldn't the bad guys be the ones suffering, and the obedient ones be happy? It should be, if that was what DRM was about. But it's not. It's about platform lock-in. It's about repeat sales of the same content. It's about training the consumer that they don't actually own what they buy, they just purchase a limited license to use it for a little while. And it's about control. This is not a good thing.
|