Note to Publishers: Your Addiction to DRM is Killing You
3 Comments
Recent Posts
Win, Lose or Draw?: The Federal Court of Appeal Overrules a Key Copyright Case on Procedural Grounds 
The Lawful Access Debate Begins: Canadians Should Pay Attention to What the Government Isn’t Saying 
The Global Battle for Data Control: How the 2026 U.S. Report on Trade Barriers Targets Data Sovereignty Worldwide 
The Law Bytes Podcast, Episode 264: Jon Penney on Chilling Effects in the Digital Age 
Heads They Win, Tails We Lose: What Lies Behind the U.S. Trade Battle For Control over Data
People have been saying that for a while now. Unfortunately no one wants to listen due to the fear that a loss on control would do to their business model.
Though I do find it highly amusing that their insistence on DRM has come back to bite them.
@Ki
Some know better, just not the “big boys” yet. O’Reilly Media is listed as an example for e-books, though since their market is technical reference books I’m not surprised they “get it”.
Apple started cluing in awhile ago with music. There are a number of smaller video game publishers that try to have DRM free versions available as well.
@BT
Even some of the larger games developers are starting to get it. Ubisoft is backing off on their DRM schemes.
And it’s not even that all DRM is evil. Steam is a DRM scheme, but it’s also a store and an online library of games you own you can download anywhere even if you lose the physical media. You’ll be locked out if Steam goes away at some point in the future, but the convenience of Steam generally make it so many people don’t care. But video games also have multiple different forms of online distribution, and can be played on any computer.
The problem here is that the publishers insisted on DRM, and then got upset when one of the companies used DRM to lock people into their hardware and sold books (at a profit overall, some books would probably have been a loss) with a lower price point than the publishers wanted devaluing the overall price of an ebook to paraphrase the publishers objections (though why an ebook ever needs to cost more than a paperback I don’t really understand). And since they insisted anyone else selling things also had to have DRM, they had the same lock in problem where people who have a Kindle but may want to get books from something other than the Kindle store can’t get them on the Kindle.