Publishing and DRM

So I came across this article today at the Bookseller's website.

To sum it up, it's from the CEO of the Publisher's Association, a lobbying group for the UK publishing industry, and has to deal with e-books. In it, the CEO talks about how publishers need to figure out how to protect people from stealing their digital content before they put it on the market.

*sigh*

I understand this is the way that big business does business. In some places, it makes sense---like in a retail bookstore. If a book is stolen from them, they lose the money they paid for it, and they money they could have made by selling it. It's a double-whammy.

The digital world doesn't work that way, however. If an e-book gets stolen--"stolen" usually meaning illegally distributed without the consent of the copyright owner--there's no loss involved, only the opportunity loss of money they might have made had someone decided to purchase the e-book instead.

But there are other, hidden upsides---like what happens when that person, a book reader, decides they want a real book and goes and purchases one by the same author, or even the same one they read in pirated e-format.

Perhaps more importantly, DRM (digital rights management--the solution movies and music providers have gone to and publishing will probably head towards as well) is a major pain in the ass for end-users. You're locked into certain programs, have to maintain subscriptions, and getting your music or video from the internet to your computer to your mobile device can be extraordinarily frustrating and sometimes impossible.

To use a real-world analogy, it's as if department stores didn't take the ink-spray tags off of clothes when you bought them. Imagine walking around in your sexy new swimsuit with a big plastic thing hanging off the end, and you have an idea of how annoying DRM can be.

And one final thing: hackers will always, ALWAYS, ALWAYS break your copyright protection schemes. It's what they live for. Look at the backflips Sony has done to try to prevent user content from being available for the PSP (every few months a new security system update comes out with the latest batch of games and movies, only to be cracked a week or two later when the hackers put out their own updates), and you'll see that that's very clear.

Maybe publishing's DRM will be better. Maybe they'll figure out how to protect their copyrights without making it so difficult to use legitimate content that people are driven right into the arms of the pirates---but I doubt it. Nobody else has, and by starting off with the "We must protect our rights!" philosophy publishing just looks to be following the crowd. And in the meantime, they're talking about saddling a brand-new and fragile potential revenue stream with unnecessary baggage and losing money that could be made off of e-book purchases by sitting around trying to figure out how to protect themselves from "online thieves." Color me unimpressed.