Nick Harkaway has an article on the site about DRM. Our audience knows most of what he says, but I found this section of interest. He wonders why people are still using DRM since it can be bypassed so easily:
If we were talking about the movie industry, though, where I used to work, I might suggest a bit cynically that DRM was still used because:
a) the people the industry has hired as consultants also sell DRM for a living
b) the players have spent too much on DRM to admit that DRM isn’t buying them anything except grief, and anyone who says this was a mistake will have to account to the board for why they blew hundreds of millions of dollars on it
c) they have done deals which obligate them to use DRM and now can’t untangle themselves from those deals without incurring further costs
d) it feels good to be doing something even if that something isn’t working
e) they don’t know what else to do, and they’re terrified that if they do nothing they’ll be destroyed.
Also, to legally enforce copyright you have to demonstrate you are taking steps to protect copyright. Even if those steps are totally lame they count. It’s like house insurance. Even though any thief can blow by a door lock in no time, insurance companies won’t pay if your house was left unlocked.
Not saying I agree… just what I observe.
There was an old saying ‘Nobody ever got fired recommending IBM’ that was later revised to ‘Nobody ever got fired recommending Microsoft’ regarding IT purchase in big companies.
In publishing, that would be ‘Nobody ever got fired recommending DRM.’
DRM and other obstacles to copyright infringement are not truly meant to prevent it (although most publishing executives look so clueless about technology that maybe they believe it) — DRM only is meant to prevent most of it, to make it difficult for the average person to circumvent. It’s really there so Aunt Jane can’t tell Cousin Sadie, ‘Oh you’ll love this book! Here, I just emailed you a copy of it.’
If publishers reduce infringement to only 10% they will have made good progress, and about all they will realistically ever be able to make.
DRM also adds the DMCA legal avenues of enforcement to all those that existed under previous copyright laws.
And we must anticipate near-term laws that will bring ISPs in the telco and cableco monopolies in as partners in enforcing copyright infringement. This will be done mainly at the behest of the movie studios, but book publishers, including the little guys not yet swallowed up by multimedia behemoths, will be taken along for the ride, and likewise protected.
Along these lines, Cox Cable just announced that they, too, will soon be shuttering all their usenet servers. This helps Cox a lot with bandwidth and other costs (such as buying and maintaining those servers and hard drives) and extricates Cox from legal liabilities from copyright infringement over the usenet newsgroups. Though Bittorrent might report very few ebook pirates, I can assure you on usenet there are several groups dedicated to ebooks and copyright infringement. Once all usenet access has been shunted off to a few commercial sources, those companies like Giganews can be given DMCA takedown notices and threatened to be sued out of existence by movie studios, television producers, and record labels — and publishers.
In short, DRM, though far from 100% effective, is the safest, most conservative approach for publishers to follow today, while they figure ebooks out.
And book publishers are nothing if not conservative.
— asotir
From what I gather it sounds like infringement is not likely to hit anywhere near 10% any time soon even for books without DRM. So if you factor in the costs of DRM, it seems counter productive from that standpoint. Also, Aunt Jane doesn’t have to know how to bypass DRM herself, she just needs to know where to find a DRM free copy. And if she has the skills to email a book file to a friend, she probably has the skills to do that also.
> Also, to legally enforce copyright you have to demonstrate you are taking steps to protect copyright.
No you don’t. You’re confusing copyright law with trademark law. This is a very common misconception unfortunately.
Cox dropped its own usenet servers years ago, letting Highwinds handle it for them, so they’re not saving on that point. They’re not really saving much at all, since only about 3% of users utilize usenet, surveys show. I also don’t buy usenet as killable. Even if you could get down to a half-dozen US companies handling most US traffic, and strangled them, nothing prevents you from connecting to a foreign server, anymore than you’re prevented from connecting to foreign websites.
No matter how much content companies delude themselves, digital products are trivial to copy, and not even a worldwide police state could prevent copyright infringement.
Since news reports are still full of examples of DVDs being pirated (“Avatar Best-Selling (and Most-Pirated) Blu-Ray Ever“, Fox News), it’s no wonder that media producers are still concerned about the security of their products.
The article cited above does suggest that it was the regional delay (in Australia) in releasing the DVD that prompted people to avoid waiting and pirate the DVD. However, I for one question whether this is good enough reason to obtain a product illegally… and obviously, so do media producers.
At any rate, DRM may not have stopped the TorrentFreaks, but that doesn’t mean producers want to sit back and let their work be stolen. Until they have a tool that does the job, their only choices are to (A) not sell anything, or (B) use the tools at hand, and wait for something better to come along. Since we know the media companies are not going to stop producing, their only option is B.