Comments on: Adobe e-book exec Bill McCoy on DRM and open formats

By: Tomasz

Tomasz — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 15:23:20 +0000

In my opinion, DRM is not popular jet but maybe it will be in the future?

To be more popular it should offer MORE than only to prohibit access or identifies the end user.

What does MORE mean? Let’s see at YouTube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jv1LpAKXIO4
Regards,

By: Spider Mattheson

Spider Mattheson — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 22:39:32 +0000

Amazon was able to get music companies to jump on board with them without DRM because Amazon was the best viable competitor to Apple. The same might have worked for B&N but Amazon would probably have needed a bigger stranglehold on publishers (like Apple with music companies) before the move to non-DRM formats prevailed.

By: Bill McHale

Bill McHale — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 15:04:10 +0000

No DRM that acutally allows someone to access the media they purchased can actually be that hard to break. Therefore DRM does nothing to stop piracy (This is doubly true in cases like books or music where old fashioned media exists that essentially can’t be encrypted). I could go into it in more detail, but essentially, given a reasonable amount of time, any competent programmer could break DRM.

That being said, it appears that the publishing industry is under an illusion that somehow, DRM will stop otherwise honest citizens from becoming ebook pirates. In reality, they would be far more effective at stopping ebook piracy if they took the following steps:

1. Make their entire book lists available as ebooks. Yes, there are authors like J.K. Rowling who don’t want their books as ebooks. Its time for the publishers to explain to them that it is ultimately a question of them publishing it as an ebook or the pirates doing it

2. Get the prices down to a reasonable level. Publishers need to stop trying to justify prices that everyone but them finds to be outrageous. If Baen can sell ebooks for $4-$6 then any of the others should be able to as well (We will make allowances for new books, but comeon, $15-20 for a book that has been in print for a year or more?).

3. Make sure buying and reading books is as easy as possible. Readers shouldn’t have to register every device they want to read on or enter keys, etc. Make sure that the epub standard is followed for as many ereaders as possible. Then the reader can download the book to the device or devices of their choice and enjoy.

BTW, social DRM is, in my opinion, worse than the current forms of DRM. Last thing I need is to loose my reader or computer with a bunch of my books on it. This is then found by a pirate who happily uploads the books, with my identifying information included, into the dark net. Next thing you know, I have to prove I wasn’t the one who uploaded the books…

By: Nonjatta

Nonjatta — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 14:08:40 +0000

I hope they consider social DRM seriously. I think it would very significantly expand sales and, if they do it quickly enough they might avoid the culture of piracy that these heavy handed DRMs always create.

There will always be people who get around these things and those people always find a way to do what they want to do. If the objective is fighting piracy rather than building choke holds for retailers (as the piece refers to. Surely not in the interests of publishers), then social DRM will be as if not more effective than anything else.
The majority of us just want to own what we buy without restrictions on our ongoing personal use placed on us by the rights holders.

By: Steve Jordan

Steve Jordan — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 13:42:30 +0000

If I’m reading his intentions correctly, he’s saying that Adobe’s using DRM only because the publishers are making them do it. He’s saying his hands are tied. If that’s so, then his comments of what he would and would not want to see are largely immaterial.

And the corollary is, if we don’t like it, we’d better find another ePub reading engine to rely on (like Zulu Reader).