Its been tried.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10075847-16.html

And the publishers will go for anything that lets them charge more this week. Never mind the long term consequences.

F: Agreed. I’ll do a link from the main story to your comment.

P: You’re absolutely right. “Open DRM” is an oxymoron. That’s why I favor either no DRM or social DRM (merely the embedding of owners’ names, etc., into e-book files).

Thanks,
David

I mean an open DRM that major publishers would swallow and feel comfortable with.

I kind of feel that the only DRM that would be acceptable to readers — one that we would swallow and feel comfortable with — would be one that involved saving keys to some place that is not going away — a global foundation or government for example — along with a registry. When you buy a book, your ID would be added to the registry as an ‘owner’ of the book. (It might also mean that the foundation/government would receive a master-file for each work as well, though I’m not sure about that — I’m no techie.)

Then if the proprietary DRM-vendor went under, you could simply go to the registry, prove your ID, and receive a key that would unlock or un-DRM the file. You would get it back. Possibly DRM-free, or possibly wrapped in a new flavor of DRM for your new platform/device.

It’s all ugly when you enter the world of DRM. Kind of like it would have been in 1750 and printers put locks on all the copies of books they sold. ‘Oh, you want to read Paradise Lost? We will send somebody around with the key to unlock it…oh, wait, that publisher went out of business, and all his keys were melted down. Sorry, you can’t read your book any more.’

Are we sure this arrangment is still in effect, given that six month after the annoucement you still can’t read DRMed ePub on stanza?