Quote:
Originally Posted by BoldlyDubious
Is this doctrine applicable also to files, which can be infinitely copied for free? However, my comments about this issue were hasty and not well thought out (I, too, set timers to myself :-) ), so feel free to reduce them to pieces (or, better still, to ignore them completely and go on with the main discussion)!
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As of right now in the US, it applies only to physical licensed goods. But in Europe it was recently decided by the courts that this is legal for software as well. It remains to be seen if it will soon extend to media but it's not that far of a jump, though who knows what will occur in the US. It's an area of law that needs some re-examination in light of current technology.
Quote:
Originally Posted by BoldlyDubious
So the current system encourages people to strip DRM from their media. And, as I said, once this has been done there's nothing that really prevents the file from flooding the whole Internet. On the contrary, in my scheme for "social DRM", the buyer of a media file has no reasons whatsoever to strip the metadata from her/his file, because she/he is already free to do with it everything she/he needs. So why should she/he do that?
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Emphasis mine. This is kind of insulting to those who strip DRM for non-nefarious purposes, you know. You make it sound like one inevitably leads to the other and that is simply not true. Many people who are opposed to leaving their ebooks DRM'd are also very opposed to piracy and are not in any way contributing to those files "flooding the internet".
DRM-stripping is not a gateway drug to piracy.
Stripping tools would have been developed even if only the pirates used them. Any DRM system creates a vacuum ready to be filled by someone who can crack it, and someone will.
Your system gives a reason to strip DRM too. Those who want to share without being paranoid about it would do so to reduce the risk. But that's really irrelevant, because it doesn't matter what the typical user (aka, non-pirate) does with the DRM -
the people who want to pirate it will still strip the DRM / watermark from the file the second it's possible to do so.