Are there any studies PROVING that DRM works?

[Shaggy]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

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.

Eyes-wide-open pre-defined usage? Seriously?

You think the average customer goes into a transaction with eyes-wide-open that they will be prevented from doing things with the content which are currently legal, but that the retailer/publisher chooses not to allow?

As far as "discourages piracy", that's highly debatable, at best.

[neilmarr]

***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?***

Hya Paul, drop a line to my tech partner, Tony Szmuk in Canada, and tell him I pointed you his way as an MR pal and Oz author. Tell him exactly what you want and I'm sure he'd be happy spend a few minutes to run it up for you with our compliments. tonyszmukATbewrite.net (use the @ sign)

Cheers. Neil

[wodin]

Originally Posted by pricecw

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

I have personally experienced this issue with Blu-Ray. My wife is a great Avatar fan, and when she bought the Blu-Ray edition in spite of already owning the DVD, it wouldn’t play on our brand new Sony Blu-Ray player. I went through the pain of upgrading the player to the latest firmware, but it still wouldn’t play. So now we have two copies of the DVD (one came in the Blu-Ray box), and a useless Blu-Ray edition.

In our case DRM worked exactly as intended, it extracted an extra thirty bucks from her wallet and gave us exactly zero added value.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by SensualPoet

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 ...

Eyes wide open? Have you ever had a friend ask you about the pros and cons of one reader over another? And tried to explain the ins and outs of which readers use what kind of DRM? Talk about a deer in the headlights, there's one example!

[Blue Tyson]

Originally Posted by wodin

I have personally experienced this issue with Blu-Ray. My wife is a great Avatar fan, and when she bought the Blu-Ray edition in spite of already owning the DVD, it wouldn’t play on our brand new Sony Blu-Ray player. I went through the pain of upgrading the player to the latest firmware, but it still wouldn’t play. So now we have two copies of the DVD (one came in the Blu-Ray box), and a useless Blu-Ray edition.

In our case DRM worked exactly as intended, it extracted an extra thirty bucks from her wallet and gave us exactly zero added value.

You didn't take it back? (Or charge it back?)

[brainycat]

Again -- for the mainstream user, DRM does not get in the way. If it truly did, e-books would not be growing in popularity as they have in the past 18 months. There's your survey data.

Every person I know with an ereader, which includes technical savviness from kernel hackers to "what's a power button", has run into a situation where they want to pay for a product that is incompatible with their device.

Format issues aside (thanks to calibre), the sticking point is DRM. If a consumer is happy to live in a "walled garden" (and look at cellular providers in .us for examples for how well that works) they won't have any problems. But not even Amazon carries every book available in digital format. And they certainly don't sell every ereader out there - all kinds of devices are available that outperform the kindle in everything but "seamless purchasing".

Kudos to Amazon for convincing a huge swath of the reading population that kindle = ebooks (a marketing snowjob that rivals Microsoft's convincing of the public that computers = windows), but the entire reading public ultimately suffers when book consumer's markets are limited. IIRC, even Adam Smith way back in the day made a point that a market only functions when consumers have choices.

There's a difference between "I don't have any issues", "I can live unhappily inside the walled garden" and "DRM is the bane of my existence and I'm willing to do what it takes to make sure products I've fairly purchased are mine to fairly use as I will". As you've rightly noted, ebook technology is still in it's infancy and like other media technologies in their infancies, it hasn't hit the critical point where interoperability is crucial.

But it will happen, just like it's happened for every other form of digital media.*

What would the world of music look like today if Sony, Pioneer, Samsung and Onkyo all had their own implementations of redbook that only worked on their own players?


*not filesystems, but media types like "books, music, movies, etc"

[Sandra Edwards]

IMO, the only thing DRM accomplishes is keeping those readers who aren't tech-savvy from reading the book on whatever device they choose.

Sandy

[Elfwreck]

As mentioned, "studies to prove DRM works" are not really possible. However, "studies to indicate that DRM doesn't cost sales" would be possible. They haven't been done. (Or they haven't been released because that's not what they prove.)

A mainstream publisher could, hypothetically, take a random set of its midlist titles, say twenty or so, and release half of them with DRM and the other half without, and track sales, physical and ebook, over the course of a year, and draw some conclusions. There'd be a lot of variables, and they wouldn't be able to make any absolute statements, but the data might show some kind of trends they could work with.

Over and over, what a casual look at the marketplace says is: Obscurity, not piracy, is the bane of authors. Books people have heard about, sell, and they sell faster if they're more accessible & cheaper. Books people have not heard about don't sell, regardless of what features they do or don't have.

Both types are pirated; there's been no evidence that piracy equates to less sales except for the ridiculous claim that every free download copy is a lost sale.

[neilmarr]

Hi Elfreck. Just an informal statistic for you -- forgetting tihrd-party retail because we don't have figures yet -- ebook sales from our own site's bookshop (guaranteed DRM-free) have soared this year. Whereas last year we were happy to see ebook sales rise to around ten percent of overall sales (the rest paperback), this year has seen a complete about-face with ebooks claiming over 90% of our sales. Even more surprising is that paperback sales have increased in volume. Says summat about the popularity of non-DRM ebooks, eh? Cheers. Neil

[CyGuy]

I am against DRM in any form on any media for sale to the public, including eBooks, DVD, Blu-ray, software, etc.

Sharing copyrighted media is already illegal, period.

It should be way beyond the ability of some company or our legislature to cause media that we purchase not to perform how we demand that it perform, this is our country.

Putting DRM on an eBook as a method to “enforce law” is akin to making your new car have a speed limiter that won’t let the car go over 70 MPH. I mean why not, it is illegal to go over 70 MPH, right? Why not let the car manufacturers enforce law too?

All of this encryption on media that is for sale has not stopped anyone from sharing anything, all it does it prevent people from using that media in a way they want to. DRM punishes regular people and does nothing to those who share files…

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

ebook sales from our own site's bookshop (guaranteed DRM-free) have soared this year. ...Even more surprising is that paperback sales have increased in volume. Says summat about the popularity of non-DRM ebooks, eh? Cheers. Neil

DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONFUSE THE BIG 6 WITH YOUR EARTH LOGIC AND SALES RECEIPTS. THEY KNOW THAT DRM IS ESSENTIAL TO PROTECTING AUTHOR'S RIGHTS. RIGHTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN SALES.

[Worldwalker]

Originally Posted by CyGuy

DRM punishes regular people and does nothing to those who share files…

Quoted for truth.

[neilmarr]

***DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONFUSE THE BIG 6 WITH YOUR EARTH LOGIC AND SALES RECEIPTS. THEY KNOW THAT DRM IS ESSENTIAL TO PROTECTING AUTHOR'S RIGHTS. RIGHTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN SALES***

That's said tongue-in-cheek, I know, Elfwreck. There's a massive amount of clear evidence out there that DRM protects authors' rights as effectively as a 'strictly no insects' sign in your garden protects against mosquitoes. Cheers. Neil

[Elfwreck]

Originally Posted by neilmarr

***DO NOT ATTEMPT TO CONFUSE THE BIG 6 WITH YOUR EARTH LOGIC AND SALES RECEIPTS. THEY KNOW THAT DRM IS ESSENTIAL TO PROTECTING AUTHOR'S RIGHTS. RIGHTS ARE MORE IMPORTANT THAN SALES***

That's said tongue-in-cheek, I know, Elfwreck. There's a massive amount of clear evidence out there that DRM protects authors' rights as effectively as a 'strictly no insects' sign in your garden protects against mosquitoes. Cheers. Neil

I'm sure it protects at least as well as spraying the lawn at random intervals with bug spray. Which means it stops some of the nuisance, and convinces a lot of people to go elsewhere for their entertainment.

[neilmarr]

Exactly, Elf. Karma to ya. Neil