Have a little respect, it's The Pirate Bay.

Actually i get my ebooks at BAEN.COM. Since i very rarely read anything other than SciFi, and that's primarily what Baen deals in. And NONE of thier books are encrypted, and when you get a book from them you can get it in about 6(?) different formats up to and including RTF files. And they even supported the original Rocket Ebook format (later called Gemstar, then sold through Ebookwise)

I agree. All DRM does is make legitimate copies less useful and therefore less valuable. It's not going to stop the Pirates, only Ninjas can do that. So just let the honest people have a fully-functional product.

Although, to be fair, the DRM on kindle books hasn't affected me in any way I can think of, yet.

Kill it with fire!

Come join our e-book reader community !
http://www.ereaderuniverse.com

I've created the ultimate DRM, it's unbreakable and unhackable.

Now if I could only remember the key...

@ roshinobi

Makes me want to become a ninja

Nothing can stop piracy. Its unavoidable thing now. Hackers are smart enough to crack anything.

People are going to continue hack e-books especially when people sell e-books for money that are available for FREE on sites such as http://www.gutenberg.org such as most of the works of John W. Campbell jr.

There is a way to guarantee a hackerproof software, and IBM has been doing it for its mainframes (I bet you have never seen a hacked mainframe!). Thier secret is to give you software that will only run on the machine's serial number. If you try to make that software run on another, it will not. So if anyone selling computer-based systems wants to prevet piracy, just have each item buyer register their machine and sell the software with the machine's serial number embedded in a way that it cannot be found (using virus technology). I am posting this so it can be prevented, but if anyone wants to try it, be my guest!

I saw a guy get pulled over for speeding the other day. This is just further evidence that traffic laws are a waste of time. Moron.

@fighttheman: Thanks for commenting, sir, but your analogy isn't quite accurate. If you want to compare speeding laws with DRM, it would be more along the lines of this:

Manufacturers would build cars with a system that automatically throttles the engine so the car stays within posted speed limits. Hacking it would constitute defeating the system, allowing drivers to exceed the limit in the rare occurrences when that might be necessary -- just like cars work (and should work) now. Of course, most drivers are honest and reasonable, obeying speed limits most of the time.

Sure, there are occasions when drivers don't obey the limits with no reasonable reason, and they should be stopped and punished. (I never said illegal copying is OK, just that DRM does more to harm law-abiding people than prevent piracy.)

Of course, the analogy isn't perfect, since safety isn't really an issue with DRM, and generally exceeding the speed limit is almost always illegal, whereas there are certainly legal reasons you would want to copy something. But the point that it's an inefficient, inconvenient and unnecessary system shines through.

@IBM fan, neat, so how does one go about lying to the software about your serial number. Err I mean accurately report it. :) Is it magic, does it not run using machine code? Because that's not terribly difficult to defeat, just find the procedure that queries the hardware, and have it instead return whatever you want it to.

It might be work, but it's not uncrackable. It's just not relevant enough to be hacked. Give me 6 months and a mainframe to work on, and I'll prove it to you.

RE: Speeding analogy

Plus, why is it legal to do 50mph in a 50mph zone, but 51mph is going to kill someone? Aren't they just as dead at 50 as they are at 51?

And if I DO speed, how does that limit someone elses ability to speed or not speed? Am I illegally using up miles from an imaginary pool that everyone is allowed to legally take their velocity from? Can I copyright gravity which makes me the exclusive owner of 51+mph for my car?

The one thing that seems to be left out of the digital rights discussion is this...

Copyright violation is NOT a criminal offense. It is a civil matter, right or wrong is a separate question but comparing it to any CRIMINAL law is a fallacy.

Let's say I get married and I have an affair, has this harmed anyone? Yes far more so than violating copy-right. However it is not equivelant to speeding, theft or for that matter stalking. All of which are criminal offenses.

Whenever a person compares copyright violation to theft they are trying to shift the legal system, and quite frankly anyone who let's them is a fool. Maybe our system of ensuring that creative people get their due needs overhauling, maybe it doesn't, but either way it is a civil matter not a criminal one. (At least currently, laws are always being passed and if people are foolish enough to agree that copyright violation is the equivalent of theft than you get what you deserve).

One last time, NOTHING is removed from the "injured party" other than a POTENTIAL sale. This also happens when a competing product exists, so this is not the reason for copy-right to be protected. Copyright i to prevent someone from profiting off your work unfairly. Which in the case of the music industry is the exact opposite of what actually happens. Companies have no natural right to profit off of an artists work, they only have a legal right, and in my opinion any system for protecting artists right to profit that fails this miserably should be under deeper scrutiny than those who commit the civil violation of wanting to listen to music or watch a movie which they have not purchased the right to own.

interference with copyright does not easily equate with theft, conversion, or fraud. The Copyright Act even employs a separate term of art to define one who misappropriates a copyright: ... 'an infringer of the copyright.' ...

The infringer invades a statutorily defined province guaranteed to the copyright holder alone. But he does not assume physical control over the copyright; nor does he wholly deprive its owner of its use. While one may colloquially link infringement with some general notion of wrongful appropriation, infringement plainly implicates a more complex set of property interests than does run-of-the-mill theft, conversion, or fraud.
—Dowling v. United States, 473 U.S. 207, pp. 217–218

Legal classification of the respective offences aside, the speeding analogy conveniently ignores the fundamental reality that DRM typically prevents some activities which are legal—just to make sure that 'no one' gets even close to violation.

A comparable vehicle velocity governing technology would forbid driving faster than, say, 10% below the posted limit—just to make sure that 'no one' gets even close to violation.

Of course anyone meaning to, say, make a getaway from a robbery, is going to find a way to defeat the limiting mechanism. Likewise, anyone hell-bent upon illegally copying a work is going to find a way to defeat the limiting mechanism.

In either case, the only people who suffer the draconian limitation are those who are unwilling or unable to defeat it. And the 'bad guys' are typically willing and able.

So the mechanism accomplishes approximately nothing beyond bending over the honest people, when, for example, Amazon.com decide that they didn't mean to sell you that book after all, and swipe it back, or Apple notice that you've moved to a location in which you're arbitrarily not allowed to listen the music that you bought, and swipe it back, or some 3rd party company tries to selling you a less expensive ink cartridges for your Lexmark printer, and Lexmark sues them (courtesy of the DMCA).

DRM doesn't work—at least not toward its supposed end. It only f's up the world.

While I agree that effective DRM is an impossible goal, until this global society stops glorifying the hackers as somehow being the heroes of the little guy against corporate greed and treats them as the thieves and fences that they are, DRM will never go away.

The excuse that "no one is being harmed" when copyright infringement happens is a complete rationalization. I own a small company that produces software and we work DAMN HARD to produce something that is extremely useful. Then some smug, self-righteous hacker posts a cracked copy on the net and you tell me no one's being harmed?

I invested a lot of time and money into producing that software and now anyone who is looking for it gets nearly as many hits from illegal torrents as legitimate resellers. And many of these torrent sites are now charging "membership" fees... which means they're not only stealing the program, they're earning money from MY (and others) work.

Furthermore, anyone who gets ANY benefit from using it illegally IS stealing from me, irregardless as to whether they would or wouldn't have ever paid for it... they have no right to use my work and no right to gain ANY benefit from my time and investment.

Imagine you had a next door neighbor with a ray gun that could duplicate anything. You work really hard to buy a new car, and the day you park it in your driveway, he zap-copies yours and has the exact same car.

You save and scrimp to buy your girlfriend a diamond engagement ring. Zap, and his girlfriend gets the same ring.

You decide to sell your car and he offers his on craig's list for only a small fee... knowing he can copy your new car when it arrives.

Is any of this right? Should he be able to benefit from all your overtime and hard work? Should he get to enjoy the sound system and leather interior that you pulled all nighters and invested hard cash on to get?

Until people stop playing semantics and recognize that copyright infringement is NOT a victimless crime and those who perpetrate it are NOT Robin Hood but are more like petty thugs, this issue is never going to go away.

@BytePlayer - your point is well taken, but what's the solution? You're not going to get people to stop pirating by appealing to their morality - most don't have any when it comes to downloading pirated content.

The assertion that 'most folk are honest' made by the author of this post is inaccurate. A minority don't do it because it's unethical, but the majority who don't pirate are motivated more by fear of consequences.

Judging by how much internet piracy there is, I'd say that a sizeable percentage are not too afraid of consequences.

Every anti-piracy measure, as I'm sure you're keenly aware, is quickly defeated. The UK's current manoeuvres on this front will quickly be neutralised, I suspect.

Do any ISPs offer a deal whereby, for a monthly fee, people could legitimately download movies, music and software, and pay creators directly when an item goes through them? Would that help if more widely implemented, do you think?

Hackers love a challenge. I say, don't give them one. Why else are there no hacks on Linux OS? It's free. They accomplish nothing by hacking it. And, it's too easy to do. Eventually, everything should be free. That way we openly share ideas. But that's in an ideal sociocracy. Alas.

I could never understand any of that, for example if you buy a CD from any company, it plays on ALL CD players, you buy a book from anyone, it is the same book. When I purchased an album through through one of the downloadable music companies and couldn't play it on my MP3 player or burn a CD to play it on my CD player I was furious, since that is the only reason I payed for it. Needless to say I cancelled my subscription to their service as soon as I realized this. Urgh! Once we buy an item we should be able to use it on whatever device we own, or may own in the future. Companies are only doing themselves a disservice by encrypting the work to be used only on their device. I usually buy my music, books, etc. from whomever has the best deal and would continue to do so if I had the freedom to do so.