Are there any studies PROVING that DRM works?

[neilmarr]

You can't DRM a treebook -- and they're so darned easy to scan that it's paper best-sellers the determined, commercial pirate runs up his Jolly Roger for.

An example is that ebook dowloads of the Harry Potter books have been available on the darknet on their very day of release ... Rowling refuses her publisher digital rights, so ALL these ebooks are pirate copies of scanned paper pages, not ebook thefts.

Ebook DRM is a nefarious scam to encourage multiple sales of a single title to a single buyer. It is an insult to the honest buyer, it restricts common rights of ownership, it causes untold pesky promblems ... and any self-respecting pirate can strip DRM as quickly as you can say, "Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum."

Neil

[MrPLD]

Neil, ( I'm going offtopic ... again )

Can you get one of those stamps to suit my site - I like the one with the rustic stamp-on-paper feel, but I'll need a white background. I could just take one of your existing ones that I liked and strip out the background if you prefer?

Paul.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by WT Sharpe

I would eventually buy all the Mason books if they were available, and I'd bet I'm not alone.

As would I. Only my personal beliefs keep me from downloading illicit copies. The rights owners are leaving money on the table. If they sold them for, say, $4 each (they are kinda small, after all) I'd buy one a week to savor, with extras for special occasions. (I wouldn't want to read them all at once and burn out, after all; that would be bad)

Now there's something I'd love: an automated Perry Mason delivery service. You pay for X books worth, and on your set schedule, they show up in your email. One every Friday night, for instance. I think some of the romance publishers do that with snail mail, but I've never heard of it being done with email.

[vaughnmr]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

As for the "6 device" thing ... someone please confirm either way on this: I've heard that it's 6 devices EVER -- that is, if you authorize a Kindle 1, Kindle 2 ... Kindle 6 (when that day comes), and de-authorize all 6 of them, you still have to throw your books away because you won't be able to authorize a Kindle 7, as you've used up your 6 authorizations. That is, de-authorizing a device doesn't "put one back in the box". Is this the case?

That's not true for the Amazon/Kindle world, don't know about Adobe...

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Only my personal beliefs keep me from downloading illicit copies.

Same here.

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Now there's something I'd love: an automated Perry Mason delivery service. You pay for X books worth, and on your set schedule, they show up in your email. One every Friday night, for instance. I think some of the romance publishers do that with snail mail, but I've never heard of it being done with email.

An ebook every week or two of the entire series in chronological would be righteous! (I do have other things to read!) Starting with The Case of the Velvet Claws. It's worth a re-read! I especially love the older books where Mason did his share of bending the rules.

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by Barcey

There will always be charlatans trying to make a profit off of peoples natural fears. The trick is to construct the scam so it can't be proved or disproved.

They used to create magic amulets that would protect loved ones going into battle. All it needed was the blood of a virgin. If they came back alive it worked. If they didn't she mustn't have been a virgin.

Today we have companies selling DRM. People pay and the companies laugh all the way to the bank. You can't collect data to prove it doesn't work so people are happy to believe it does. The best data I've seen it doesn't work is that Apple's iTunes sales didn't go down when they got rid of it.

Reminds me of the witch scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. The DRM companies use logic on par with "If she weighs the same as a duck, she must be a witch!"

[toomuchreading]

You know of course that Baen Publishing has all the numbers and proof for anyone who wants to request it? They have been proving for years that DRM does not work, hence all their books are DRM free. They even have the numbers for releasing their books free to make more money. All the proof anyone would want right from the source. If all the other publishers would listen to Baen and follow their lead, we would be in a wonderful world of ebooks for all!

[Psykhe]

Originally Posted by amoroso

Are there any independent studies proving with sound data and methodologies that ebook copy protection via DRM is effective? By effective, I mean some sort of reasonable metric such as increased ebook sales or reduced distribution of unauthorized copies. I am interested in independent studies, i.e. not commissioned, conducted by or involving DRM vendors, publisher groups or publishing industry organizations.

You are looking at it from the wrong perspective.

The point of DRM is not to stop someone from "stealing" some software under all circumstances. It is to hinder or delay him.

Think of it like a lock for your bike. A lock on your bike does not make it impossible to steal your bike, just more difficult. If you leave your bike a night in a crime-heavy area it is very likely it will be gone even with a good lock. But that does not mean that a lock is useless.


Basically DRM "works" if it it causes more sales (due to higher difficulty to steal it) to at least pay for the development and deployment of said DRM.

While the ebook DRM isn't really very strong (and therefore not very effective) it is not of much use. However by the same reason it also does not cost the producers much. So it still kinda "works".

Also, you will not find "independent studies". I mean, think for a moment. Studies (especially thorough studies aka studies which actually are of any use) cost money and time. Quite a bit of it.
So... who should in your opinion ever do a useful study about the effect of DRM exept those which have an interest in its efficiency?? And those are the very people who use them. So their studies are not "independent".

[Kali Yuga]

Getting back to the OP's question....

Unfortunately, it is essentially impossible to set up any sort of study, independent or otherwise, to test the efficacy of DRM.

The only possible way would be to make an exact duplicate of the planet, and release one book in DRM form on one planet, then release the same book without DRM on the other.

Seriously, the only people who would fund such studies will have vested interests in one result or the other; same for those who opine and theorize on the topic. I wouldn't hold any more or less trust a study done by the Free Software Foundation any more than one done by the RIAA.

[amoroso]

Originally Posted by Psykhe

Also, you will not find "independent studies". I mean, think for a moment. Studies (especially thorough studies aka studies which actually are of any use) cost money and time. Quite a bit of it.
So... who should in your opinion ever do a useful study about the effect of DRM exept those which have an interest in its efficiency??

Academia or research institutions? Sending spacecrafts to the planets also costs money and time, yet it gets done.

[SensualPoet]

Originally Posted by Worldwalker

Whose legitimate ebook presence is zero. I'd bet if you checked the darknet, you'd find plenty of Perry Mason books

Well, I'm not interested in stealing or depriving the legitimate rights holders of their due payments. As you stated later in this thread, you'd love to "subscribe" to a $4/week/month Perry Mason Ebook-A-Thon. I'd be in line, too.

And, yes, I've sourced a dozen PM titles on the darknet that easily become Kobo-ized and Kindle-ized for my collection. (I might add I already own most PM titles in pbook format). I will buy e-copies when they eventually appear. In the US, there are 30 years of sales ahead; in Canada, 10 years thanks to dead author + 50 years rule.

Where you and I part company is seeing DRM as the bogey man here: the availability of ZERO Perry Mason novels -- a 20th century icon -- has nothing to do with DRM and everything to do with stupid, greedy, legal stalled processes and participants within the publishing channels that tie up the rights to profitable, saleable backlist content.

A great deal of Nero Wolfe / Rex Stout has been re-issued by Random House in the past six months -- a content trove about the size of the Perry Mason oeuvre -- and both Random House and the Stout heirs are now enjoying an e-book revenue stream lost to the Erle Stanley Gardner heirs.

So to wrap up: DRM ... applied as it is today which doesn't interfere with legitimate readers who purchase eyes-wide-open pre-defined usage ... works because it discourages piracy and is seamless to most users. But the glaring backlist gaps -- such as Perry Mason where e-books haven't been pirated because they've never been issued ... in fact, FANS have typed/OCRed and corrected the darn things that are otherwise out of print -- encourage piracy because the publishing infrastructure is mired in greedy rights disputes instead of focusing on keeping titles in print as e-books. DRM is neither here nor there for these works.

[WT Sharpe]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

A great deal of Nero Wolfe / Rex Stout has been re-issued by Random House in the past six months -- a content trove about the size of the Perry Mason oeuvre -- and both Random House and the Stout heirs are now enjoying an e-book revenue stream lost to the Erle Stanley Gardner heirs.

I've bought a few of those!

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by Psykhe

Think of it like a lock for your bike. A lock on your bike does not make it impossible to steal your bike, just more difficult. If you leave your bike a night in a crime-heavy area it is very likely it will be gone even with a good lock. But that does not mean that a lock is useless.

That analogy is a little flawed, because this isn't a one for one scenario. If every model of that bike had an identical lock, then whether or not your particular bike lock does any good is depending on the fact that nobody has ever picked any bike's lock. Once one person, anywhere, figures out how to pick the lock, then all of the locks are useless.

What it boils down to is that it doesn't make it more difficult for each person to steal your bike, just for the first person who tries. After that, the locks are all gone. Additionally, with the way DRM works, it is impossible to make the lock unpickable.

[pricecw]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

DVDs and Blu-ray also use DRM to prevent rampant unauthorised copying by the general consumer. There are few complaints about that because it also doesn't get in the way of normal usage.

Actually, I have read a lot of articles on DVD and Blu-ray getting in the way of consumers. This is especially true of Blu-ray, and I know of a number of people that are usually early adopters avoiding them. The issue is the industry decided that DVD encryption was broken too easily and quickly, so with Blu-ray they made a system that could be upgraded when a device was cracked (and could lock out a device if desired). So you have stories of people that buy a movie, take it home, and all of the sudden, they have to go online to upgrade the player to watch the movie. I have read first hand accounts that the person spent over 3 hrs to upgrade to watch the movie they just bought. Worse, is when you find out that your device will no longer play the movie, because the MPAA decided that class of device was compromised and disabled it for all new releases.

What comes from this, is more people turn from Blu-ray, to piracy. Why, simply because they are being locked out and inconvenienced to prevent what is happening anyway. DRM is not working, and is causing the problem it is meant to curtail to actually grow.

Personally, I am voting with my wallet. I don't have a Blu-ray player. I don't buy books with DRM. And I don't download copies of books I don't buy. I would rather force any author/publisher/etc into obscurity rather than support a system that deems me a criminal before I do anything. If I had one wish for the system, it would be that everyone did this. If all users refused to purchase DRM'd ebooks, also refusing to buy paper, but just do without, the system would change quickly. Either the ones DRM'ing content would go out of business, or they would change. The ones respecting their users would grow. Refuse to buy, and let the Author know why they lost you as a customer/reader.

--Carl

[ficbot]

You get to a point where it becomes a delicate balance, I think. For example, my mother is not techy enough to remove DRM or use pirate sites or anything herself. So in an iTunes-like system, she probably would buy legitimately. But then you get into the tricky spot where even the walled garden is too complex for her---so now she asks me to buy the ebooks for her, and I do know how to tinker with them. So a customer who could have stayed in the lines is now not necessarily...