A poll on the MobileRead forums asked how respondents dealt with DRM on e-books: by not buying books with DRM, buying books with minimally restrictive DRM, buying encrypted books and then breaking the DRM, and so on.
The poll is nonscientific with a very small sample, a sample comprised of people who know and care enough about e-book reading to have sought out and participated in a forum about it. Nonetheless, it is interesting that among these people in the know, 48% of those who answered (80 out of 166) as of this writing state that they break the DRM. The next most popular answer, not buying books with DRM, only got 20%.
Although the poll does not support drawing conclusions about most e-book consumers, what it says about the well-informed ones is interesting: almost half of them think little of violating the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for their own convenience.
For those who know how to get around it, DRM is no longer anything more than a speedbump. And the know-how can be found in just a few minutes of Googling. There is hardly even any risk to those who do it—nobody is going to know that you cracked the copy protection on your e-books in the privacy of your own home.
It just goes to show what I have been saying for some time now: There is no longer any point at all to putting DRM on e-books.
As the person who started the poll in question, I was rather shocked by the high numbers of people who broke the DRM. My personal preference is essentially a boycott on publishers who use DRM’d materials. Between free sources and non-DRM’d books, there is plenty go keep most readers busy for the rest of their lives. Six months or a year, I would hope, would be enough to show the publishers that they are only hurting themselves by using DRM.
One of the thing that worries me most about DCMA and the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension act is that it is causing many to develop a very casual attitude about the real needs and benefits of copyright (When copy right is properly limited). I personally feel properly limited copyrights would allow most authors to benefit as well as the public– certainly there is no need for copyrights to extend 70 years after the death of the author.
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Bill
It rather reminds me of an excerpt from one of Thomas Macaulay’s speeches to Parliament, speaking of a law that would have lengthened copyright terms beyond what he felt were proper: