On 19/01/2011 06:35 PM, Jim Henderson wrote:
> On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 09:30:58 +0000, scott wrote:
>
>> Assuming people would follow the terms in the license agreement doesn't
>> seem bad or faulty to me.
>
> The bad assumption is that people will buy it, so then they write the
> license agreement to reflect that bad assumption.
>
> It's a faulty premise, and not really my problem that they made a bad
> assumption and based their business model on it.
>
> Most people that I know feel the same way - I bought the (CD, ePub,
> whatever), so if I want to convert it to something more convenient for my
> own personal use, that's my business.
>
> Where it becomes a problem is when I convert it to a format that's
> convenient and then share it with someone who should buy their own copy.
>
> The problem, really, is how to draw the line about what's right and wrong
> from an ethical point of view.

The way I see it, there's two sides to this DRM stuff.

On the one hand, publishers (of all kinds of content) stand to lose 
insane amounts of money due to digital data being trivially copyable and 
distributable. They need to figure out a way around that.

On the other hand, some publishers seem to be trying to use DRM as an 
excuse to charge people more money for what they used to be able to do 
for free. Or to force them to use one specific product. Or to spam them 
with adverts. Or to secretly track their activities. Or generally to do 
a whole bunch of things which have nothing to do with the nominal 
objective of "preventing piracy".

I'm not sure how the situation will resolve itself. I'm hoping that 
legislation will eventually be passed to prevent publishers doing evil 
stuff like the Sony rootkit fiasco. (Don't hold your breath...) But 
fundamentally, digital information is trivially copyable and 
distributable. That makes it difficult to see how you could make a 
profit out of it, unless you assume that a very high percentage of users 
will voluntarily pay money for it even though they don't have to. I'm 
not sure that's a good assumption.

Which is worrying, since most of this content is ludicrously expensive 
to produce in the first place. If there isn't going to be any profit, 
nobody will do it any more. And that would be tragic...

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