E-Book protection

[pdurrant]

Originally Posted by LauriceJEvely

check ebook-security.com, it is an affordable ebook security solution that protects your PDF and EXE downloads from illegal file sharing.

From ebook-security.com:
"Ebook-Security.com is an affiliate web site that promotes the Virtual Vault, a product owned by Shawn Pringle of www.cbprotect.com and www.topnetsolutions.net. As of 3/5/14, we are discountinuing the promotion of his product due to non-payment of affiliate commissions."

That doesn't exactly inspire confidence!

[crossi]

Gah. Flatter yourself much. You assume that anyone would want to read your book much less vast hordes wanting to pirate it. Hardest part is to get anyone to read it.

[Cinisajoy]

Originally Posted by crossi

Gah. Flatter yourself much. You assume that anyone would want to read your book much less vast hordes wanting to pirate it. Hardest part is to get anyone to read it.

Do you mean to tell me that if I write "The adventures of cin", it won't be a runaway best seller?
Gee and I was even going to use my own drawings.
I'm gonna go pout now.

[dgatwood]

Sorry to bump a somewhat old thread, but I wrote the reply before I noticed the age, and I figure I might as well add a technical explanation of why DRM doesn't work so that if somebody else comes to this thread later, they won't be tempted to bump it for the same reason. :-)

Basically, DRM is a fundamentally flawed concept. It is approximately the digital equivalent of handing people locked boxes containing books, then handing them the keys to the boxes, and saying that they can use the keys to read the books inside the boxes, but they can't take the books out of the boxes to make copies or loan them out... and then walking away and hoping that they don't unlock the boxes, take the books out, and toss the boxes in the trash.

At a fundamental level, truly robust DRM is impossible. At some point, the user's device or computer must have the decryption key, because otherwise it cannot decrypt the protected book/song/movie to present it to the user. And as soon as that key exists on a device controlled by the user, it can be extracted, and someone can then write code that decrypts the book for other purposes.

And once the DRM has been cracked, every book/song/movie that was ever encrypted with that DRM can also be cracked using the same process. Over time, that cracking gets more and more trivial until it is so automatic that it takes minimal effort to crack the DRM on a new book/song/movie, at which point it no longer even serves to "keep honest people honest" as many proponents would have you believe.

More importantly, once a single copy of your work exists out there that is not protected by DRM, there's no longer any benefit to having the DRM, because people can just exchange that copy and make infinite numbers of additional copies of it. However, the users are still stuck dealing with the DRM long after it ceases to do the publisher any good (and we're well past that point for every DRM scheme that I'm aware of).

But the biggest flaw in DRM is not technical; it is social. Statistically speaking, people who share content also buy more content than average. So although you can theoretically say that content creators get less money than they would in a theoretical universe where the users had to pay for all of that content, the reality is that they wouldn't pay for all of that content, and moreover, would pay for less content than they currently do, because they wouldn't be exposed to all of that content for free.

That's the perverse reality of DRM. It does little to no good for publishers, causes harm for users, and costs an insane amount of money to keep up the endless cat-and-mouse game. DRM really needs to go away, and anybody who says otherwise is probably trying to sell you something—probably a DRM scheme.